Puzzled

I solve my jigsaw puzzles in my dining room, on a little platform that rests atop four thin drawers designed for sorting and storing. I start by pouring the puzzle pieces onto the platform, turning them face up, and arranging them into categories helpful to the eventual solving. One drawer is reserved for straight-edged pieces, and the other three get pieces of similar themes or colors, pieces that seem as though they will eventually make up some distinguishing feature of the larger image—a mountain ridge or teacup, perhaps.

It’s a good system. And yet, as I stared at my latest puzzle—a 1,000-piece reproduction of William Morris’s leafy, lovely Tree of Life tapestry—no obvious categories presented themselves, save for the border pieces. Even those were dismayingly similar in color and pattern, making it nearly impossible to build from the one corner piece I located. The best I could do was to divide the pile roughly between pieces with bluish backgrounds and those with a gold-beige hue, leaving one drawer disconcertingly empty. I felt defeated before even beginning.

To grasp the extent of my dilemma, it is helpful to have in view the intricacies of a William Morris design. Morris, father of England’s Arts and Crafts movement, is perhaps best remembered for his audacious declaration that you should “have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”—a dictate evidenced by his intricate and sumptuous floral wallpapers. Morris patterns are dense and winding—full of fruit, vines, birds, and leaves—and simultaneously repetitive and symmetrical, in the style of an oriental rug. Though Morris’s symmetry is an aesthetic choice, the repetition is largely a function of process. Many of his wallpapers were created through woodblock printing, with artisans painstakingly aligning the woodblock motifs over and over in what’s called a seamless repeat.

I would not have lasted long in a Morris studio. After finally assembling my puzzle’s outer border through a slow process of elimination, I was conflicted about whether to continue. Or rather, I was unsure how to. Each puzzle piece was a mystery unto itself. It was impossible to tell top from bottom or whether the piece was to be situated horizontally or vertically into the whole. The best approach seemed to be the trial-and-error one I had taken with the border pieces. But that was a finite set—not even 100 of the 1,000-piece total. The thought of trial and error with the remaining 900 was dispiriting. I am not built for seamless repeat.

There also seemed to me something less sporting about the trial-and-error approach. The pleasure I take in jigsaw puzzles is derived, in part, from the thrill of competition. I enjoy the breaking down of a task into bite-size pieces and seeing how, finally, to conquer the thing. I like matching wits with a puzzle, discovering its secrets, and then besting it. When I do the Sunday crossword (are you surprised?), filling in the individual boxes doesn’t satisfy me as much as cracking the larger code. Once I figure out a crossword puzzle’s governing theme or trick, I sometimes neglect to complete it. As soon as I get what the designer is up to, it’s game over. I win.

The problem with a competitive approach to puzzles is that you take what is intended as a soothing and distracting pastime and quietly hitch it to a goal and a ticking clock. Although no one was standing over me and my Morris puzzle with a stopwatch, I brought to the task a nagging sense of urgency. After all, in our accelerated world, trial and error is not only boring but irresponsible; time is the single most precious resource we have. So the hours I spent hunched over my dining room table, testing piece after piece, caused me to fret over opportunity costs. Household chores, a backlog of books to read, texts and emails in need of responses—any number of things might better have filled the minutes I was ostensibly wasting on the puzzle. These objections, of course, could be made of every jigsaw puzzle, but at least simpler, more apparently “relaxing” puzzles are easier to justify doing. In short order, as progress is made, I get a little hit of accomplishment, akin to checking off an item on a to-do list. It is leisure disguised as productivity; therefore I allow it.

The irony of taking this approach to a William Morris puzzle was not lost on me. Morris and John Ruskin, another pioneer of the Arts and Crafts movement, were vocal critics of their newly industrialized era, deeply skeptical of the value being placed on productivity. Addressing the pro-work attitudes and practices emerging around him, Morris wrote, “It has become an article of the creed of modern morality that all labour is good in itself. I recommend … not to take it on trust, but to look into the matter a little deeper.” Commenting on his own hopes for labor, he offered the following: “It is threefold, I think—hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself.”

I decided to keep at the puzzle.

Despite my best intentions, an internalized late-stage capitalism was driving me relentlessly past rest and pleasure and straight toward product completion. Thankfully, the Tree of Life resisted. I could not for the life of me find a section to get going on. Progress came only in admitting the inability to see. Or, more accurately, in slowing down and learning to see differently. The direction of the printed fabric grain. Small variances in color or thickness of line. These were my only tiny clues to where a piece might belong. To work on the puzzle was to give myself over to utter disorientation.

And still, I remained stubbornly blind. So many times, I’d try to place a piece with a section of winding green vine only to realize that the vine was bending in the opposite direction of what was needed. The whole thing reminded me of the ill-fated afternoon my husband, John, and I spent installing crown molding in the bedroom of our first home. Things were going beautifully until we encountered strange gaps at the corners that no amount of flipping, cutting, or rethinking angles could close. After about an hour of turning long strips of molding this way and that, some yelling at each other, and possibly some storming off, John and I decided we were losing our collective mind. It was his stepfather who eventually introduced us to the compound miter cut. The vines in the Morris puzzle worked the same way. A hidden geometry, one not immediately accessible to me, undergirded their beauty.

After completing the bottom portion of the tapestry, I had to decide whether to embark on the upper two-thirds. With large, leafy branches extending in all directions from a central trunk, the Tree of Life seemed no easier to complete than the floral pattern surrounding it. Meanwhile, the busyness of life was calling me out of the dining room and into the bustling world beyond.

The birds inspired me to continue. Five small birds embedded in the tree. Five where I first counted three. After finding a piece with a segment of wing that didn’t belong to the three I had assembled, I stared at the box lid in disbelief and, like Annie Dillard before me, was prompted to wonder how so many birds could hide in a tree without my seeing them.

So, I downshifted yet again. I would pick up a piece, study it intently, and place it only after attending to its every detail. Often, I would simply put the piece back in the pile, realizing that I did not yet understand where it was meant to go. These moments of surrender did not induce despair. It was as though my immersion in the tapestry, with its serene, patterned beauty, had begun to change my brain. I was moving at the speed of attention. To complete the puzzle, I understood, I would have to stay in that zone.

And it was in that same zone that, several weeks later, I quietly crossed the finish line. One afternoon, passing by my almost-completed puzzle and noting the few remaining gaps, John predicted that I’d be done “any minute.” In truth, it took three more slow, seated sessions to finish, hastened only slightly by an improved ability to see a thicker piece of branch, a relatively lighter blue tone.

That quiet and halting finale differed from my experience with any other puzzle. Typically, the insertion of the last 30 or so pieces is a solution crescendo during which I’m half-standing above a puzzle, snapping in pieces with satisfying speed. This burst of puzzle energy brings forth my husband and children, who—in the spirit of the little red hen’s barnyard companions—gather to take part in the final glory despite having sat out all the prior work. Unlike the little red hen, I don’t mind. I like it when my family joins me as a puzzle concludes. It’s less lonely that way, and far more efficient. But Morris upended my need for efficiency. Outsmarted me with all that swirling and repeating. As the puzzle progressed, I cared less about the final product and more about my increasing ability to see the patterns. When the final pieces went in, in what turned out to be a moment of hushed solitude, I was both happy and sad. A solution had been achieved, but the journey was over.

In those early frustrating days when I was on the brink of giving up, I had enticed myself with the thought of using puzzle glue to shellac the finished thing together and make it suitable for framing. Initially, I believed this desire to be about preserving a piece of Morrisian artistry for myself, placing something in my house that I knew to be beautiful. But I wonder now whether I wasn’t just looking to create a monument to my own productivity. A kind of tangible justification for the hours spent, head down and neck cricked, over the daunting piles of pieces. As though the rewards of rest and renewed attention were not reward enough.

In the end, this memorial didn’t come to pass. To restore my dining room to general use, I removed the completed puzzle, resting on its platform, to the coffee table in our living room, so as to admire it a few days longer. But I live in a house crowded with teenagers and wagging dog tails, coffee cups and wineglasses, scattered magazines and pieces of mail, and this setup was no more sustainable than the dining room had been. Four days after completing it, four months after starting it, I folded the corners of the puzzle in on themselves, allowing the pieces to break apart. The destruction of a jigsaw puzzle has a satisfaction all its own, a whispering soft crunch as the pieces pop out of their neat arrangement and fall to the table below. Puzzle etiquette would have you further break up the puzzle for future solvers, and so there is a second satisfying step involving the blind and rapid delinking of individual pieces from one another. The destruction is so much simpler than the creation.

Morris was deeply thoughtful about the costs of creation—in particular, the cost of creating art. If people were truly left to work in accordance with their needs, he hypothesized, they would create the ornamental only when they deemed it worth their time. And creation under these circumstances, he suggested, would be art at its most genuine: “Whether it is to be called art or not, it will at least be LIFE; and, after all, that is what we want.” I mulled over this idea as I swept pieces into the box—puzzled in some other, deeper way by the entire experience. Had the time I’d spent been rest or labor? Pursuit of pleasure or product? Had I been wasting time or living life? Of all this, I am still not certain. One thing I do know: no other jigsaw puzzle I’ve done has ever left an essay in its wake.