Trevor Noah Explains How Kintsugi, the Japanese Artwork of Repairing Pottery, Helped Him Overcome Life’s Tragedies

Trevor Noah finish­ed his stint because the host of The Dai­ly Present a lit­tle over three years in the past, however he’s made him­self into anoth­er form of pop-cul­tur­al pres­ence since then. In evi­dence, we’ve got his seem­ance above on the pop­u­lar pod­solid and YouTube present Diary of a CEO. For greater than two and a half hours, Noah dis­cuss­es with host Steven Bartlett (who, like Noah, additionally hap­pens to be African-born with combined mum or dad­age) his rea­sons for stop­ting that polit­i­cal-news-com­e­dy TV insti­tu­tion, his strug­gles with depres­sion, and the time his step­fa­ther shot his moth­er within the head. She lived, owing to the mirac­u­lous­ly in contrast to­ly tra­jec­to­ry of the bul­let, however that did­n’t cease the expe­ri­ence from becom­ing what Noah describes because the worst of his life.

Dis­cussing all this brings to his thoughts the Japan­ese artwork of kintsu­gi (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured right here on Open Cul­ture). “It’s a prac­tice of restore­ing pot­tery and ceram­ics which have bro­ken,” Noah explains. “What hap­pens is, you break a plate, otherwise you break a vase or some­factor,” and “they put it again togeth­er, these arti­sans who do it. However they don’t simply glue it again togeth­er, they glue it again togeth­er they usually form of adorn it with a gold­en bind­ing. And what you get is an object that’s some­how extra beau­ti­ful than earlier than it was bro­ken.”

Kintsu­gi struck him as “probably the most beau­ti­ful con­cepts, and a dif­fer­ent approach to consider being ‘fastened’ or ‘over­com­ing’ ”; it was­n’t “the concept that we’re per­fect, the best way we had been earlier than some­factor hap­pened to us, however moderately, it’s that we get to put on our cracks with a brand new sort of pleasure, and a brand new sort of beau­ty.”

Noah would onerous­ly be the one per­son to see in these recon­sti­tut­ed ceram­ic ves­sels with their gleam­ing kintsu­gi seams a metaphor for him­self. Like various pub­lic fig­ures within the West, he’s been will­ing to dis­cuss the vicis­si­tudes of his life intimately, and even use them for mate­r­i­al in work like his stand-up com­e­dy and his mem­oir Born a Crime. However it’s unusu­al, in a chat like this with mil­lions and mil­lions of view­ers, to listen to ref­er­ence made to a half-mil­len­ni­um-old Japan­ese type of pot­tery restore. That pos­si­bil­i­ty, after all, is cen­tral to the attraction of long-form inter­view pod­casts, whose con­ver­sa­tions have the time and house to go far down unex­pect­ed paths. The Dai­ly Present might deliv­er extra laughs per minute, however giv­en its for­mat’s time con­straints, kintsu­gi-type speak is little question the very first thing to get edit­ed out — and the lower cer­tain­ly received’t be excessive­mild­ed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Kintsu­gi, the Japan­ese Artwork of Restore­ing Bro­ken Pot­tery and Discover­ing Beau­ty in Imper­fec­tion

How Japan­ese Kintsu­gi Mas­ters Restore Pot­tery by Beau­ti­fy­ing the Cracks

David Lynch Explains Why Depres­sion Is the Ene­my of Cre­ativ­i­ty — and Why Med­i­ta­tion Is the Solu­tion

Stanford’s Robert Sapol­sky Demys­ti­fies Depres­sion, Which, Like Dia­betes, Is Root­ed in Biol­o­gy

Stephen Fry on Cop­ing with Depres­sion: It’s Rain­ing, However the Solar Will Come Out Once more

Charles Bukows­ki Explains Tips on how to Beat Depres­sion: Spend 3–4 Days in Mattress and You’ll Get the Juices Move­ing Once more (NSFW)

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the writer of the newslet­ter Books on Cities in addition to the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social internet­work for­mer­ly often known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.