From The Idle Gazette, The Glued Cup.
The seam will show. Modern adhesives are miracles and the line still catches the light, a hairline of honesty across the glaze, and the temptation is to regret it, which would be exactly backward. The Japanese, who think about broken ceramics more seriously than anyone, repair their best pieces with lacquer and powdered gold, making the fracture the brightest line on the object; the practice gets invoked so often in essays of this kind that the gold has begun to obscure the insight. Strip the gilding and the insight is plain, and available to anyone with white glue: the seam is a date. The cup now carries its own history on its surface, the before and the after and the fact that somebody voted for the after. Replacement erases an object. Repair promotes it, from crockery to veteran, and the seam is the decoration that comes with the rank.