The Society of Smallness

Katsushika Hokusai, Pair of Scissors and Sparrows

One late summer day in 2012, two friends were having a pleasant lunch in the sculpture garden at the Art Institute of Chicago when a bird dropping fell out of the sky and landed in an impossibly tiny space between one of the friends’ hands and her lunch. Also on this date, following the Chicago Public Library’s temporary overdue fee amnesty, a woman returned a rare copy of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray that her mother borrowed 78 years prior. These seemingly random events were taken as a sign—over the course of the next few days, a conviction bordering on lunacy took hold about the need for concentrated work and attention towards small things in all their variety and complexity.