Maintenance and return

Maintenance and return is the work that undoes itself. You trim the wick and by morning it is a charred ruin again; you clear the bed and the green haze is back within the week; you wind the clock knowing it will spend down the tension by tomorrow. The essays gathered here are about tasks that are never finished, only kept at — and about the particular attention that kind of work asks of a person.

The easy reading is futility: Sisyphus with a trowel. The essays resist it. The return is not the failure of the work; it is the shape of it. A house stays alive by being tended each day, not by being fixed once and for all. What looks from outside like mere repetition is, from inside, a groove worn in the day — a small trench of attention that keeps you present to the world’s recurring, ordinary needs.