The varnish is failing. The faucet drips. The fan in the corner clicks. This is not a guide on how to fix a house. It is a record of what it feels like to live in one that is slowly falling apart. In The Accumulation of Small Resistances, Elias Vance explores the quiet, tactile war between order and entropy. From the “useless specificity” of a stripped screw to the chemical smell of drying glazing putty, this collection of essays dismantles the domestic world into its rawest components: friction, tension, gravity, and rust. Written with a microscopic focus on texture and sound, these chapters do not offer advice. They offer observation. They inhabit the cold basement floor, the silence of a stopped clock, and the specific grit of sanding dust on a fingertip. This is a book for anyone who has ever stood in a hardware store aisle holding a broken piece of plastic, wondering why matter is so resistant to human will. It is a meditation on the inheritance of objects, the weight of tools, and the inevitable return of the draft in the window. “Maintenance is rarely about the dramatic failure of a system. It is almost always about the accumulation of small resistances.”
