There’s something about shattered glass that’s unsettling. The shattered glass itself and the process of glass shattering is intricately linked to irreparable damage. What worries me most about a broken piece of glass is how much it can hurt. The problem with shattered glass is that it has many broken pieces and each on its own dangerous and hurtful.
The odd thing about it is that the single piece that consisted of all those smaller pieces was in all likelihood very safe, smooth and probably even beautiful. When broken, all those pieces lose their form, beauty and meaning. They may be laid out in a beautiful manner but that isn’t always the case and even then they remain dangerous pieces of glass that may cause damage.
Even the sound of glass breaking against a hard substance is very disturbing. It violently disturbs the relative peace preceding it. The sound of glass breaking announces an event that must be dealt with in an urgent manner. It’s very distracting, imposing and intrudes on all activities happening around it.
Another thing that bothers me about shattered glass is the amount of small pieces it has broken into. So many pieces suddenly exist and some of them are so tiny that they can’t be seen. Some of them fly away so far from where the glass broke that their position cannot be anticipated. These small pieces are still dangerous and invasive, for even after a shattered glass is swept off and cleared away, no one can ever be too sure that all the pieces have been picked up. The once safe area is transformed to a ore dangerous upon which one must tread cautiously lest he be hurt. Those small pieces can hide well and unsettle a once peaceful and quiet place.
There’s also a sense of waste when glass breaks as well. This sense of waste is all the more magnified when big pieces remain intact and have sharp edges that render them useless. It strikes me even more with colored glass whose shattered pieces look beautiful and reflect light in so many ways yet nothing can be done with it but throw it away. The glass once shaped to server a purpose now serves none and in fractions of a second morphs to an inadequate state making it worthy only of disposal.
It’s a waste of glass and a waste of something good when glass shatters. There’s something unsettling about it, about the irreversibility of the process and the randomness of the result. I certainly prefer glass before it has been shattered.
5 comments:
Well..this is quite random..i liked it.
Something tells me you're not really talking about glass (or maybe that's because while reading it, i didn't relate it to glass).
Here's a piece of trivia though, you can clean up those little and almost invisible pieces by using toast or a wet cotton.
I didn't know about using toast. interesting piece of trivia.
Tell me fruedian, what did you relate it to if not glass?
How sick am I, Freudian's handy tip on the use of toast to clean up miniscule shards of glass made me wonder whether in the history of the world anyone had ever murdered anyone else using this method :-s
Interesting post Will.
Since i'm going through some family-related trauma...all i saw was my family being shattered.
Amnesiac- I thought of it myself, you're fine!
freudian: shattered glass does describe it very well I suppose.
Amnesiac: It took me a while to understand what you meant. I guess I'm not as diabloic as some.. the most i could think of was what a waste of toast.
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