It looks fucking great actually - yeah, really nice. It's beautiful - but useless. And as William Morris once said: "Nothing useless can be truly beautiful."
- Tony Wilson (played by Steve Coogan) in "24 Hour Party People" (2002)
24-Hour Party People is one of my favourite films and it's full of interesting philosophical quotes like this one. It resonates with me because it perfectly describes one of my personal aesthetic prinicpals that items showing signs of use have their own beauty moreso than the same item when it is new.
I first realised this when browsing r/victorinox. I am fond of Victorinox Swiss Army Knives and I have a few of them. The manager is my EDC knife and gets used literally daily, I'm lost without it. However I found a lot of posts on this sub-reddit were people that were buying so-called limited edition knives in the whole range of colours to own them as a collection and that made me sad because to me they are tools and tools are meant to be used. These knives were just going to sit in a drawer, very likely unopened, and maybe traded to another collector someday. Then I look at my Victorinox Cadet 2015 limited edition in Navy Alox, its a thing of beauty because it is covered in scratches and signs of use.
Recently I have been working on some projects that were made possible using TCL Expect scripts. It isn't often I have a need for this and I saw I needed better knowledge on the topic but reference books are expensive so I bought Exploring Expect second hand. The copy I got was in very good condition, it had been minimally used, if at all, so I have since addressed this injustice and thumbed my way though the book picking up all kinds of useful knowledge contained inside. It is now a book that served its creators purpose and as such it is beautiful.
My father-in-law is an old sailor and publican who was a cook for many years and I realised I appreciated looking at his wooden chopping board. It is small and round but contains probably half the mass it was original made from after decades of use. I later purchased myself a wood block and to my wife's chargrin I abuse it with careless abandon in the hope that some day it'll contain all the scars of a life well lived. Cooking is a chaotic process and where magic happens there is mess and there is wear.
When my grandfather passed away 12 years ago, he left behind his workshop and all his tools from decades of regular use crafting all kinds of things from fences, to window frames, to furniture. Like all good woodsmiths he built his own workbenches and it was emotional seeing them after he died displaying all the scars, divets and stains he made over the course of his life. When I moved into my house it was the first time I ever had space for a workbench but with a new baby I didn't have time to build one so I bought a nice one as a birthday gift from my wife and it was a beautiful bench. They say when you build a bench though it is easy to treat it too well and the first thing you must do is to strike the surface with a hammer to stop it from being too perfect. Suffice to say I didn't do this and I did find myself avoiding giving it damage until one day it happened by accident, but instead of being sad about it, I looked at it and smiled because now that workbench is ready for use.
I'm interested in hearing of any examples you might have of things which become more beautiful as they incur signs of wear.