Odyssey of the Puzzle

I devoted the bulk of my first few weeks of isolation to the completion of a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. It
was given to us by friends last January as a birthday present for my wife. It depicted an idyllic cabin by
the lake that was invocative of the cabin by the lake we are currently living in. It was a lovely gesture.
We thanked them for their thoughtfulness and put the puzzle away in our games cupboard. We were
not sure when we would actually do the puzzle but it was nice to have it in case the need arose.

The need arose.

One of the reasons we don’t do puzzles is that they require a large, flat, comfortable surface which is not
easy to come by in our modest home. But with no plans for company in the immediate future, we were
free to move furniture around to create the necessary playing surface. We put the extension in the
kitchen table and rotated it so it projected into the living room. We ate our meals at one end of the
table and spread the puzzle out on the other end. It still wasn’t comfortable but it was large, flat and
well lit.

On the 16th day of our isolation, we cut the box open and ceremoniously dumped the pieces on the
table. We knew the drill. Frame first, then we tackled the large objects with distinctive straight lines
and/or unique colours. My wife primarily used the colour and shape of the pieces to solve the puzzle; I
relied more heavily on the picture on the box as a guide. And so began our odyssey of the puzzle.

I came to know every piece of that puzzle more intimately than I have known anything in my life. One
piece had a bit of antler running through the upper left quadrant. Another was shaped like a
gingerbread man. Some pieces found a home in the puzzle the first time I picked them up. Others hung
around for over a week until the puzzle filled in enough for the errant piece to be properly placed. But
once a piece joined the collective, it lost its individuality and blended into the puzzle to complete the
picture.

My thoughts wandered. What is a jigsaw puzzle? First and foremost, it is a puzzle to be solved. But
unlike many puzzles, it can be eventually solved with a modicum of talent and a sufficient reserve of
stubborn determination. In our case, 3 to 4 hours a day for 16 days. Our daily routine was to give it a
good hour or so in the morning and then, during the course of the day, wander back to it as we drifted
past the kitchen table in an aimless quarantine shuffle.

Ultimately a jigsaw puzzle is a testament to one’s character. You usually complete this arbitrary, time
consuming but ultimately useless task for no better reason than not allowing yourself to be a quitter. I
documented the odyssey on Facebook and received both encouragement along the way and hearty
congratulations upon our eventual success. It was reminiscent of the praise my mother would heap on
me for my handmade Mother’s Day card.

A fair number of friends who followed our odyssey considered the activity to be a craft or an artistic
endeavour. Some commented on the beauty of the picture. Many insisted that we frame and hang the
completed puzzle on our wall. I am skeptical as to whether there is any artistry in completing a jigsaw
puzzle. It is someone else’s art work that we are constructing through pure grunt work. Unless one
considers pattern recognition to be artistic, solving a jigsaw puzzle seems more of artistic appropriation
than art. I understand the impulse to frame and keep the completed puzzle for prosperity, but is it really
practical to frame and display every jigsaw puzzle one completes in one’s lifetime? Framing is expensive
but the lack of available wall space is a bigger deterrent than a lack of available money. And aesthetically
I think that hanging even a small number of puzzles on my walls will make my house look like a cross
between an elementary school classroom and the world’s cheesiest art gallery.

So what to do with the completed puzzle? The only reasonable option seemed to be to break it up and
put it back in the box. It took 16 days to put the puzzle together and only 2 minutes to tear it apart
again. It was then that I felt the full force of the second law of thermodynamics more commonly known
as entropy. A puzzle contains information which we recognize as a picture. It takes a great deal of
energy in the form of human labour to put a puzzle together and make this information intelligible but
very little effort to destroy the information. And of course, entropy only moves in one direction. Shake a
jigsaw puzzle and it will fall apart but no matter how long you shake the box, it will never spontaneously
reassemble back into a completed picture.

Once the pieces were back in the box, it became very apparent that the goal was never to complete the
puzzle at all. Rather it was merely a mechanism to fill time. In this way jigsaw puzzles are like life itself.
It’s all about the journey; the destination is, in fact, trivial.