Dilettantes are interesting. They have the time to work on elaborate details and research endlessly. They can concentrate resources, buy materials, and put details into products I wouldn’t and couldn’t—they’d break—but they certainly are lovely.
Dilletantes produce one item in several months of work. I literally can’t afford that. The old saw about time being money may sound crass, but it has a real bearing on life in craft—I can’t afford to sell you a spoon for twenty dollars that cost me forty to make, but a dilettante doesn’t realize this and can and will.
You may think that I am jealous or that I resent these folks. But that’s not true. I’ve had some for students and have learned as much from them as they did from me. Being a dilettante is frequently a step towards becoming an artist or craft person. It can be a developmental phase – I was once one.
One of the things I’ve realized recently is that the process works in reverse, too. One or two of my friends and I are slowly reducing our workload, spending more time on single projects, spending more time on research, and generally working hard on going back to being dilettantes.
But we like other terms for it: Old Hand, Master, and other titles we invent. Our heads are grey or have thatches of white. We speak quietly but authoritatively about things we’ve done. Our behavior is modeled on individuals we knew when we were young. We talk in authentically impenetrable nautical jargon as they did. Our speech is salted with regional witticisms, terms, and stories. We comment authoritatively about the rigging on the Bella Rose or how Samuelson got the sheer all wrong on his famous model of Samoa. Occasionally, we mumble, and the listeners strain to hear our words of wisdom, fearing they may be the last.
We hope to garner speaking engagements, consulting gigs, and newspaper and journal articles about us—in short, to finally profit from all those years of hard work!
Whoever thought that being a dilettante could turn out to be a career-spawning move? I am accepting speaking engagements on my social media feed. Serious inquiries only. Please!
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You are a very funny dilettante. 🙂
I am an abssurdist at heart.
Ok, so I had to Google this word.
Hmmmmm…made you look! just remember that Catorze is not a dilettante, he’s a Master.
He probably knew the word!
That’s the scary thing about them…what you don’t know.
I am a dilettante. The root is “delight” and it means one who delights. There’s an advantage to being a dilettante rather than a professional because a dilettante is constantly discovering and delighting. 😀 It’s a point of view.