The Sculptor's Apprentice

There is an old workshop story, told in slightly different shapes in every country that has ever put a chisel to stone. It goes like this. A young apprentice is standing in front of a block of marble the size of a small pony. His master, an old sculptor with white in his beard and dust in his eyebrows, hands him a hammer.

'Carve a lion,' the master says.

The apprentice stares. He has been in the workshop for six months. He has learned how to sharpen tools, how to sweep, how to mix plaster, and how not to knock over the master's coffee. He has never carved anything larger than a pear.

'I don't know how,' he says.

The master looks at the block for a long moment. Then he says, 'It is not hard. You simply remove every part of the marble that is not a lion.'

The apprentice laughs, because he thinks it is a joke. The master does not laugh. He walks back to his own bench, sits down, and continues his own work, which happens to be a marble hand so lifelike it looks as if it might reach up and take the chisel from him.

The apprentice stands with the marble for the rest of the day. He does not carve anything. In the evening he sweeps the floor and goes home and eats bread and cheese and thinks he has been given a stupid instruction by a stupid old man.

In the morning he comes back. The block is still there. He picks up the chisel. He does not know how to carve a lion. But he does know — he is fairly sure — that a lion does not have a corner. So he removes a corner. Then he removes another. By the end of the week the block is no longer a block. By the end of the month it has a shape that is not yet a lion, but is definitely not not-a-lion. By the end of the year it is a lion, or at least a young apprentice's honest attempt at one, and the master looks at it, nods once, and says, 'Now carve a horse.'

I love this story because it is a lie that tells the truth. Of course you cannot carve a lion by removing every part that is not a lion — you have to know what a lion looks like, you have to know how the tools cut, you have to know when to stop before you take off an ear. The master's instruction is not literal advice. It is a way of unfreezing an apprentice who is paralysed by the size of what he has been asked to do.

Most of the things we are asked to do in our lives arrive as blocks of marble. Write the book. Raise the child. Change careers. Save the marriage. Learn the language. Get well. If you stare at the whole block, you will never lift the chisel. But if you look for one small corner that is clearly not part of the lion, and you take that off, then look again, and take off another — you will find, one morning, that the shape is emerging.

You will not have carved a lion. You will have removed everything that was not one. That, in the end, is the whole trick.