I just wonder- doubt really - if, lets say a Zen monk, or even someone steeped in a truly non-anglo mind-set, would be considering the concept of preservation and the rest of it. What we chat about here is by it's nature, I fear a relatively recent, probably almost exclusively, mid/central European thing. Not to say that they don't do it in Asia at this time.
And it's just got me thinking, on a personal level understand, am I bothered or would I be bothered if someone labeled my work - on this barn, for example - as a salvage job? Or someone said I'm fixin' it up not restoring it. And here is where it gets a bit Eastern now, but my first reaction would be or was, rooted in my ego. Now I am not discounting the distinctions. I find them critical and very important in that being clear headed at this level will influence the many large and small decisions ahead, decisions with short and long term consequences impacting those things written of up there- resources and money and the environment and all that. But in the end, to me I am every bit as happy repairing something as I would be restoring something. Yanagi writes of the utilitarian tea bowls made in their thousands by Korean - what's the English word now- pot bakers, you know, someone who makes cups and plates and vases with clay on a wheel... anyway, can't think o' the word, but these Koreans- slaves they were- made these things constantly, non-stop, never looking up from the potting wheel, they slapped glaze on unevenly or whatever and stacked them on top of each other in ovens. But the bowls they made are the models or the inspiration for potters - that's it, potters!- now, who get the highest prices for their tea bowls.
Makes me think of the hand hewn rail road ties mentioned in another place on this web site. Would this not be the height of achievement for any timber framer around here these days? So if you say that what I'm doing is a-fixin' that barn door, that makes me think of ol' gramps and the grandpa of gramps maybe and what their relationship is to that one over there trying to figure out if that nick on a post was done with an ax head or an adze and how high that post was propped up at the time. Yeah it is all pretty subjective.
Can I just add this, that the floor of my barn is clay in no small part due to the parsimoniousness of the old man who lived here up until he died a few years ago. And this floor is a pain. It's pitted and uneven, I've got to keep the rabbits off it or they dig it up, and on humid Fall days, it is as slippery as an ice rink and all the neighbors say, "you gotta throw dawn a slab of cement over that" by which they mean hire someone to came and do that. I hate cement though and have recently switched to lime- from limestone or seashells it doesn't matter, but it is beautiful, that floor, you don't see many like it either.

Don Wagstaff