“A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone."
“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”
Exactly this. You can skin and cut a whole sheep to pieces with a small knife while others sweat profusely using a meat axe and a saw and you can do it faster. If something moves, it can be cut where it moves. Spaces between vertebrae and ribs. Articulations.
The bit about the state of the knife is also true: My father has French and German bayonets from WWI and WWII. You have to be very careful near those things.
“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”
Exactly this. You can skin and cut a whole sheep to pieces with a small knife while others sweat profusely using a meat axe and a saw and you can do it faster. If something moves, it can be cut where it moves. Spaces between vertebrae and ribs. Articulations.
The bit about the state of the knife is also true: My father has French and German bayonets from WWI and WWII. You have to be very careful near those things.