Lego – I can’t bring myself to capitalise it more than once – was born today in 1958, when it was granted its Danish patent. Parents have been performing staccato hops over the plastic bricks ever since.
I will not be alone in remembering a Lego set as being an object of endless desire. As a Christmas or a birthday approached, my mind was stirred not with gratitude for the son of God, or for my parents having brought me into the world, but with anticipation for the hollow rattle of a rectangular box hidden somewhere in a wardrobe. Children don’t question why they receive gifts on their birthdays rather than give them.
How I’d dream of the worlds the Lego would unfold. Poring over catalogues, or looking at displays in shops, there was the newly minted creation the box was designed to make – an aircraft, a spaceship, perhaps a scene from Star Wars. And then there was the promise of all the other creations that the box of bricks unlocked. The only limit was imagination!
We will never be able to create the Lego sets our imagination half apprehended
As the big day approached, one sensed, like Wordsworth’s inner child intimating immortality, that the world of imagination was boundless. With the new bricks would come wonders. The Lego set would mark a caesura. Before, the humdrum routine of normal life, and after – oh, I was never fully sure, but I knew it would be wondrous. Ideas of enlightenment are always vague.
My enjoyment of building the sets, when they arrived, was utterly real. I was even able to enjoy the infuriating irritation of finding the right pieces and trying to follow the instructions to put them together in the right order. To this day the construction of IKEA furniture is a pleasure, taking me back to being a kid putting together Lego.
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But the days after the completion of the set were never quite as glamorous or world-expanding as I expected. Once I tried taking the new set apart, and putting it together with the power of my imagination, I found that my imagination seemed to specialise in clumsy shapes and straight lines. I could build a wall, but anything much beyond that was certainly beyond me. My ‘spaceships’ were rainbow-colored trapezoids – amalgams of crenellated frustration, less like intergalactic cruisers and more like architectural accidents. Not only could I create nothing that came close to matching the original tank or submarine, I couldn’t even, once the pieces had mixed themselves up, go back and create the original.
The lessons of childhood are not easy; if they are to be lessons, they never can be. What I learnt from Lego was the pleasure of working away at something, but I also learnt about my mediocrity and my limitations. I could have learned how they might be overcome with endless effort and studious practice, but if I had learned that then I would not have been a normal kid, and may not have been a kid at all.
Only decades later was I able to understand that satisfaction lies not in the outcome, but in the labour. In Adventures in Contentment, David Grayson, a much finer guide to life than his countrymen Thoreau or Emerson, says this:
Happiness, I have discovered, is nearly always a rebound from hard work … She loves to see men at work. She loves sweat, weariness, self-sacrifice. She will be found not in palaces but lurking in cornfields and factories and hovering over littered desks: she crowns the unconscious head of the busy child.
Lego did not teach me that, but childhood is a seminary, a seedbed, from which adulthood emerges with whatever wisdom we have been able to glean. We will never be able to create the Lego sets our imagination half apprehended, just like we will never be Messi or Michelangelo. Alexander wept salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer – an image that loses no power for the fact it didn’t come from Herodotus but from Die Hard. Even Shakespeare was disappointed with his powers of invention:
Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why write I still all one, ever the same…
Lego is wonderful stuff, and kids can make whole worlds from it, so long as they learn to accept that the worlds they make will never be as fully formed and stylish as those they imagine.
In the aftermath of the bestselling erotica for which it was named, an author given as C. T. Grey produced a brief satire titled Fifty Sheds of Grey. Fantasy erotica was transplanted to a mundane reality of malfunctioning lawnmowers and draughty garden sheds – in which it could not survive.
‘Make me feel pain like I’ve never felt before,’ pleads the heroine at one point, blindfolded and barefoot. ‘Alright,’ replies the hero, asking her to walk towards him and placing Lego bricks on the shed floor.
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