“When all you have in life is a hammer, it’s not uncommon to see nails everywhere.” The line stuck with him from a read, lingered as a morning refrain, and today it rose again with the energy of a catchy tune you wake to and can’t shake. He carries the hammer in thought wherever he goes, and from that image other truths bloom: his lens as a biologist shapes how he views the world through biology; as a chemist, through chemistry; as someone with ulcers, through the pain; as someone nearsighted, through myopia; as a farmer, through the tractor; and as a financier, through the penthouse in town. The hammer becomes a metaphor for how expertise narrows perception, turning every issue into a single tool for every job.
That narrowing is prejudice—an ingrained bias that colors judgments across life’s spectrum. Health officials often resist the protests of medical staff who feel overwhelmed by the system. People rooted in politics see the world through the prism of power and policy. The more people exist, the more prejudices accumulate, like stones in a growing riverbed. The speaker harbors a stubborn prejudice of a different kind, a fear of meaning slipping away into shadows. A lingering line about shadows and ashes surfaces—a reminder that life can feel like a dream that never quite lands. There is also a practical bias toward pharmacology: a reliance on pills to mute noise and keep focus, even at midmorning, so the hammering of nails does not echo too loudly. Yet the image of hammering nails harks back to childhood, when a bored child was handed nails, a piece of wood, and a hammer by a patient father. That simple setup seeded a lifelong fascination with making—building, fixing, and understanding how things fit together.
One rule from a quiet kitchen conversation still rings clear: don’t crush fingers. In the mental museum, that warning sits beside a belief about control and consequence. The house of memory fills with boards that resemble hedgehogs, a visual that feels almost whimsical and alarming at once. Recent reading of a stark, intimate novel—Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen—reveals a character who spends life chasing the same repetitive action, the same small ritual, and perhaps the same questions. It’s tempting to connect that literary thread to the hammer image, suggesting the habit of repetitive action can shape a person as surely as a nail shapes a board. There is a quiet note of fatigue, too: nothing proves more irritating than possessing a single tool without a set of compatible nails, and the world can feel misaligned when the available tools fail to meet the need. In such moments, the hammer owner may carry a heavy burden of social grudges, and the urge to blow off steam can run high, sometimes with destructive outcomes.