My son and I spent weeks assembling
a Lego car, 3,000 bricks of hard plastic
intricately connected to form a whole.

It had a steering wheel, suspension,
moving pistons—a perfect model of a road-
worthy vehicle. We stood back to admire

what we had built, not from scratch, true,
but from hundreds of pages of instructions
we carefully followed, step by step.

And because it was designed to be used
and not merely admired, my son played
with it for days. But like anything man-made,

it was fragile: it came apart bit by bit
until, before we knew it, the chassis was
missing pieces, the steering no longer worked.

If you’ve ever built a replica, you know the
challenge of making it resemble the ideal that
inspired it. You know there comes a point

when the sum of broken parts is greater than
the whole, the best course is to start over, and
you curse yourself for having tossed the manual.