I have already mentioned in this space the sheer pleasure I derive every fortnight from Katherine A. Powers' column, A Reader's Life. In her most recent offering she celebrates the re-issue of a book that details and honors the author, Walter Rose's nineteenth century grandfather, The Village Carpenter.

Here is KAP's reflection on the book:

The Village Carpenter, then, is a reminiscence and recordof 19th-century carpentry, its practitioners, methods, tools,materials, and its place in village life. The governing theme of thebook, and the element that makes it so utterly satisfying, isfittingness: the fittingness of certain woods for certain purposes, oftools for their work, of different men for their occupations.

And she continues:

Essential to the carpenter's nature and what fits him to hiscraft is his jealous attachment and devoted attention to his tools, tothose "mute servants waiting the moment of need." Understandably he isloath to lend his precious implements to another and, as Rose noteswith a trace of umbrage, "for this simple reason the carpenter hasoften been credited with a churlishness that does not belong to hisdisposition." Certainly the carpenters one meets in these pages, if notthe world, are cheerful and good.

Musing on "fittingness," I was reminded that it is also a theological-aesthetic principle often invoked by Thomas Aquinas: the principle of "convenientia." Thus, Aquinas holds that it was not necessary for God to become human to effect our salvation. But it was fitting that He do so.

In light of Powers' column, one might say that it was also most fitting that God's human occupation was: carpenter.