Notes from the Field

Following the recent discussion about a fretboard from Bill Monroe’s mandolin being for sale on eBay for $75,000, and all the expected jocularity about that much money for a fragment of a mandolin, etc. Most of the fun was about the out-of-proportion expectations of the seller and the absurdity of expecting someone to buy it for that price.

Be that as it may, I would be the first to cheer if it is sold for that much or more.

I am beyond wondering why some things are worth so much to some people. Patek Phillippe's 1932 Henry Graves pocket watch recently went for something like $24 million at auction, and while it has 24 some odd functions, not one of them is a phone, or the internet, or playing music, or recording voices, or taking pictures.

I have no problem with it. At all. It may not be worth that much to me, but it is not ridiculous that it is worth that much to someone. For whatever reason.

I accept the excesses because the reverse is worse, where everything is only valued at its absolute significance, where a car just gets you from A to B, a mandolin is only so much wood and wire, your friends and family are just so many minerals and moisture not significantly different from lettuce, and your whole life is nothing but a dash on a headstone between two dates.

Come on. There is always a context in which any given thing can be seen as meaningless, and in which it is ridiculous to love. I don't care how "realistic" and "practical" you are, I can find things you deeply cherish in your own life and, I can find a context in which it is patently ridiculous to have those feelings. When folks go out of their way to strip the meaning from everything, they should not then complain to me how the world is meaningless. I won’t hear it.

We sentient beings don’t live in the world of objects, we live in the world of the significance of those objects. I remember an episode of Kung Fu, many (many) years ago. It showed a discussion just after Kwai Chang Caine takes the pebble from the master's hand. The pebble was the symbol of his whole life at the academy and taking it indicated graduation. "Time for you to leave." All this was shown in the opening, but in one episode they flash back to a follow up conversation, where Caine asks to keep the pebble, and apologizes for his sentimentality. The master smiles and says that the earth itself is but a pebble, and yet many people love it.