I’ve lost my blue glass beads and I miss them. The beads were a souvenir of a few days in a lakeside Italian town, but that is not why their loss matters. Each of the translucent blue beads had a whitish swirl which made it look like a tiny planet Earth, and one day when I had a two-year-old on my hip, he touched each bead saying softly to himself, “Earth. Earth. Earth. Earth.” That is why I miss them.
Credit: Paolo Lim
I’m attached to the lost blue beads and to my walking boots and a cane dining table and many other things. Nor am I alone in loving inanimate objects: last year at the Louvre, no less, there was an exhibition called Les Choses, translated as “Things”, which explored human relationships to objects. There were paintings of bowls, mandolins, books, coins, silk drapery, seashells. The program explained that everyday objects have been honoured since the beginnings of human culture; that in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, for example, they symbolised the sacred.
Human attachment to things is criticised as materialistic, a shallow, anxious, or competitive need to surround ourselves with stuff in the face of the void. “It’s only a thing. You can’t take it with you,” the wise say. Of course it is only a thing and we do use things to signal wealth and status: one little painting by Chagall displays how much money we have, how artistic we are, without saying one self-noting word. But there is more to it than that. We love particular, ordinary things – but not everything, so there is discrimination, a choice, in our passionate caring for things.
There is gratitude in my attachment to some things – boots, walking poles – because they have accompanied me through hardships and are therefore accorded the status of companions. They are not fungible; it takes months to let them go when they are worn out. I don’t feel the same way about my printer, oven or car, even though they help me just as much. It’s personal; perhaps others do love their oven.
We love particular, ordinary things – but not everything, so there is a choice.
Things are also valued because they physically represent memories; reliquaries containing the invisible past, like saints’ bones in a box. The glass beads already contained a memory of Lake Maggiore, where I bought them, then of hiking across France as they became my “walking beads”, long before they gained the memory of a child making his first metaphorical connection between created objects and the world.
Loading
It’s not just holiday souvenirs that represent memories. There are also the daily things; the cane table where I wrangled two kids into eating vegetables, where we had Sunday lunches with friends, where relationships were dissected and re-stitched. Household furniture, cups, caps – they can all hold memories. I have a broken bracket from the verandah of my childhood farmhouse: it has no monetary value, it’s not beautiful, but I cannot part with it. It would be like throwing away my past. My son confessed how much he misses the NY cap that had travelled all over the world with him, only to be left in a backpackers in Amsterdam. The cap and shabby bracket are irreplaceable; copies will not do. Such is the nature of an object soaked in the salt and sugar of memory.
It’s even more the case for things that connect us to others: a bowl given by my potter friend, a brooch from my great-grandmother. They contain the memory of the person who gave them and represent our relationship. I once bought my mother a teacup with cornflowers painted on it at Portobello markets and carried it all the way back from London. After she died, another family member took the cup and I was heartbroken – and indignant. It contained my love for her and her love for me.
