We find, in the most unlikely of places, new ways to think about ethics and our lives as lawyers. Consider, for example, John Jerome's Stone Work: Reflections on Serious Play and Other Aspects of Country Life (New York: Viking, 1989).

The author and his wife, Chris, "live in western Massachusetts, on what was once a working farm, but now is only fields and woodlot, a nice piece of land with a house on it." [5] The decision to take up country life is followed by another, to build a stone fence. "There are fine old maples and fruit trees around the house, but it sits on a sidehill knoll, the land rolling off into open fields on three sides. It's a little stark; there isn't enough demarcation. What the place really needs is a stone wall here and there to organize the open space." [5] Jerome is about to become a stone fence builder. He considers and rejects the idea of hiring someone to tear the old stone fence down, move, and reconstruct it where it will improve the aesthetics of his little farm. Rather than hire out the job he decides to do it himself, even if it is an "awful job." [6] "I had to try it. I owned a small tractor; I'd get a wagon to pull behind it, haul the rocks out of the woods myself. I'd find some old-timer to teach me the basics of building stone walls, then proceed on my own. I'd get inside this elemental task, examine it, master it. I'd take my time at it, take years if necessary. . . ." [6]

Jerome sees the decision to build the stone fence as being a "contrarian" impulse: the job is awful but he'll do it rather than hiring it out. He knows himself to be a "frenetic" person and sees in building the stone fence a contrary nature, a gradual, slow work. [6] Jerome recognizes an element of "perversity" in this fantasy of stone building but it doesn't deter him. [7]

One might see in the straightforward way Jerome talks about fence building, the building blocks of an approach to ethics:

"[E]ach wagonload will push the length of the wall ahead by a couple of feet, a satisfactory inchwork progress across the field." [7]

"Simple, but not easy. You put the stones where they go: where they fit (sit solidly, securely link the stones on which they rest, provide a proper bed for the stones to come), and where they are needed (to fill out the dimensions of the wall you have imagined). You just have to learn to see where they go, how they fit. [7-8]

"Twenty years ago Chris and I lived in the city, working for magazines, swept up in that jokey, aggressive, distracted life: wrestling with words and paper in tall buildings under fluorescent lights." [11] They leave this world and try to work their way "back into a more accurate alignment with the physical world. . . ." [12] The decision to leave the city "was less a moral or esthetic choice than simple burn-out, that dreadful combination of fatigue and despair." [32] Jerome talks of a "city disease" he calls "pushing against time." [33]

"Spring won't settle in, winter won't unclamI can't get into the woods to haul new stones until the snow goes; I can't extend the wall anyway until I dig new footings, and the ground is still frozen." [1]

What makes one stone wall better than another? "I'm looking for field walls, the raw stone piled the best way it will fit and stand. There are plenty of those, too, some clearly finer than others, but I can't yet quite see why. The stones fit better, that's all, the only criterion I can puzzle out. . . . The problem is figuring out what I am looking at, or looking for. It is a problem I have had in other areas." [13]

Jerome raids an old abandoned stone wall, located in the wrong place and falling down, four hundred yards from the house. Removing the stones from the old wall Jerome reflects on the quality of the old wall. "The way some stones had been placed just make more sense than others. I began to notice places where my predecessor had done a good job, and where not." [57] "I still couldn't say what it was that I was seeing. Working with stones holds you at the level of the absolutely specific; generalizations are beside the point." [57]

"There's no need to go at this as if you're killing snakes, you know; it isn't going to get finished in an afternoon; you might as well come to understand the process." [14] "Taking more care tricked me nicely into taking more time. . . ." [14]

When he begins the work, and starts shoveling the foundation, it "sprinkled a little sobriety over my fantasies." [14]

"This stone work business was turning out to be more complicated than I planned." [16]

After the first wagonload of stones gets moved from the old wall to what will become the new one, Jerome says: "Only twelve or fifteen revelations in that first load of stone: aspects of this project I had grossly underestimated or improperly conceived, matters I had insufficiently considered. About one discovery per stone, each of which represented a succession of problems -- to be solved, mostly, by application of force, although the problems of selection and placement also required something else, some other kind of force -- of intelligence, or judgment--that I didn't yet quite have available." [22]

Building the stone wall draws Jerome to books on stone wall building. [13, 16, 30- 31, 57, 58]

"Stone work does keep reminding me, mystifyingly, that I am male; feeling male is also not a state I am comfortable owning up to. Very little else that I do calls gender to my attention." [20] Later, Jerome points out that men and women may talk about craft differently. [58-59]

The stone work "fills an unacknowledged need." [20]

Jerome says he has known from childhood that there is a difference between those who can do things and do them well and those who cannot. While shoveling the ditch for the footing of his first stone wall, Jerome recalls shoveling with his stepfather. "We did a lot of shoveling together, Ott and I -- drainage ditches, fencepost holes, gardens. He was good at it and I, at age twelve or fourteen, was not. This gulf was the source of endless frustration between us, my skills insufficient for the tasks he set, his skills setting an impossible standard. But then all was gulf between us anyway." [20]

After ruminating on his relations with his late stepfather and the kind of skills he had, Jerome admits that stone work is like a "psychiatrist's couch." [21]

On his efforts at carpentry work: "I lack confidence that my carpentry will ever work out, go at it slapdash in order not to waste time on failures, cut corners out of cheapness -- and watch the prophecy fulfill itself." [21]

"I dimly glimpsed that there were skills to acquire, and tried to avoid hurting myself until I acquired them." (22). Being a "competent" wall builder is "a figment of my twitching imagination. . . ." [33]

After finally getting some stones to fit and getting the wall under way: "I didn't have any idea how I'd done it, exactly. . . ." [23]

"There is also the sizeable problem, on any given day, of getting started. It's as easy not to start stone work as it is not to start anything else." [30]

"The wall is by definition a loose structure, but the more tightly you can pull it together, the more satisfactory it's going to be. After a while you don't think much about the wall's size and shape because you're busy trying to tighten it up, fill all the holes. You stare, your head aswarm with the shapes of the holes you want to fill and the shapes of the stones available, looking for a match, and then for a better match. You sort stones endlessly, dreaming of the one that will sit most securely on what's belong, most fully take up its allotted space. Stacking becomes obsessive. I find myself trying to get a better fit even when I'm loading stones into the wagon." [30]

"Joinery, it now occurs to me, must be the foundation of all craft. You put two things together to make something else, to accomplish some purpose; the better they fit, or work together, the greater the pleasure from the making. Stone, wood, glass, metal, mud, any material, any combination, it's the fitting together that turns work into pleasure, turns tedium into trance." [31]

"There's rhythm enough to stone work if you can find it, a natural swing: stone snatched into the pair, pivoted into position, deposited into place. Some days you have to feel around, hunting with limbs and joints, to find the timing. It teases you: the closer you come to getting it right, the easier the work will go. Somewhere, always just out of reach, there is the stone-work equivalent of hitting the sweet spot, that magic alignment of forces and masses that gives maximum result for minimum energy." [38]

"Rhythm definitely soothes (rock-a-bye baby); it also haunts, its presence organizing the world, its absence, when I need it, throwing all into chaos." [44-45]

During the summer the wall "nagged" at him. [57]

Jerome doesn't try to inflate what he is doing, referring to it as a "personal indulgence, worked on in fair weather, at as slow a pace as I chose." In moral, ethical, practical terms, it was "an entertainment: play, not work." [59]

At times he has trouble talking about stones and wall work. [57-59]

"The physical epiphanies available in working with wood and metal and stone are no different from those other little instants when some flicker of truth comes in." [109]

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