Blue beads, a cap, a cup … How everyday objects can generate joy – and heartbreak

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.

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.

As the notes for Les Choses pointed out, things are cherished, too, for their sacred purpose. The Churinga stones of Indigenous Australians, Jewish menorah, the Christian chalice, the Koran of Islam and Hindu carvings are made of stone, metals, wood, paper – the ordinary bounty of the earth. Yet they symbolise what is not of this earth, what is transcendent. Or perhaps they remind that we are all of us of this earth, nothing more and nothing less.

But things are also loved for their beauty. It is not necessarily a separate category: sacred things, useful things and mementos can also be beautiful, but there are things loved purely for their aesthetic appeal. Some are natural objects, a piece of driftwood or a stone, but humans have also loved made things for a long time. In Les Choses I fell in love with a pot in the form of a pomegranate made in Cyprus 4000 years ago. It may have been a useful thing, but it was surely made for beauty.

The love of beautiful things is deep and ancient and it is hard to argue with Keats that “a thing of beauty is a joy forever”. Still, I suspect I value the ordinary love for my walking boots and my lost blue beads over the exquisite love for purely exquisite things. No, I can’t take them with me, and yes, the blue beads are only a thing, cheap and hardly beautiful, but neither can I take any of this loved world, that loved child with me. All of it, every single thing, will have to be let go. No wonder I grieve the blue beads.

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