The Shakers were a religious sect of no more than six thousand people who lived in a handful of eastern communities in the 1800's. Not many groups that small have made such a lasting impression on some area of our culture. Shaker furniture is some of the simplest, most interesting and graceful ever designed. The Shakers didn't self-consciously set out to design anything. Design grew out of necessity. They made pieces of furniture and tools that did what they needed to have done. It wasn't design, the way we talk about design in overblown terms today. It wasn't built to sell - it was built to use. Their furniture is beautiful because it is so instantly recognisable as useful. A small sewing table of cherry provides a good work space and it has a curly maple front edge an inch wide that is a yardstick. A Shaker woman measuring a piece of cloth never had to move. The yardstick is its own decoration. They applied nothing to furniture that was merely decorative. If Shakers had built cars, they wouldn't have put chrome on them. Shaker craftsmen didn't turn out furniture to be bought by strangers and fitted into a strange place in a strange home, either. No two pieces of Shaker furniture are alike because each was built for a specific purpose to be put in a specific place. You wouldn't think a wheelbarrow could be a work of art, but the museum displayed a Shaker wheelbarrow that would compete for any crowd's attention if there were a Rembrandt hanging next to it. Impressed as I was with the Shaker furniture, I was even more impressed with the people who had come to the museum to see it. It is a small, unpretentious exhibit and yet here, on a hot summer night, several hundred Americans .... Presbyterian, Chinese, black, white, lawyer, doctor, young, old .... crowded into the Whitney Museum to stare thoughtfully at and enjoy, with a common sense of appreciation, the work of people from another age who had done something good. In the subways beneath the same street, there was filth. At the very moment people gazed on a Shaker chest made of maple, cherry and butternut, there might have been a mugging in a nearby street, but here, in this one civilised place, there was evidence enough of intelligence, humour, compassion and respect for other human beings to sustain anyone's belief in the fundamental goodness of people for a long time. It was exhilarating. The world, I thought, is not going to hell after all. From NOT THAT YOU ASKED: (GOODWILL TOWARD MEN) By Andrew A. Rooney Or is it? Perhaps we should say a little prayer, just to be on the safe side. "From too much zeal for what is new And contempt for what is old, From putting knowledge before wisdom, Science before art and Cleverness before common sense Good Lord deliver us" FROM WORK OF ART TO STATE-OF-THE ART I should confess that I come from a long line of machine bashers. In my family, when a machine does not work, it is summarily executed. My own rage is normally reserved for modern electrical appliances that have been re-designed to make life more challenging. Recently I bought a small digital electronic bedside alarm clock ... Everything is perfect with this alarm clock, except that you cannot read the face when you are lying in bed. The