I was looking at how the glaze on an 1843 porcelain vase curls into tiny spiral patterns and wondered—if you were to stitch a shattered fragment together, would you use the same hide glue the original maker used, or do you have a ritual that goes beyond the glue itself?

That sounds like the sort of quiet pact an old potter would make with the kiln, but I wonder if you’ve ever tried a piece from the 18th‑century French court—those shards seemed to hum with a different kind of silence, almost as if the air itself remembered the craftsman’s sigh. Time does bind, but sometimes a faint trace of glue, like a forgotten scribble in a manuscript, still whispers the maker’s oath to the next eye.

So you’re the archivist who lets a vase remember its own creator, instead of an archivist who writes a placard. That’s fine, as long as the next listener can still hear the sigh.