"Her many belongings were precious but heavy with the weight of memory."
—Irvin D. Yalom
In drawers and cupboards, on desktops and shelves, in pockets and purses, we keep precious items. Pencils, rocks, shells, boxes, pennies, bells, rings, and things are unique and precious. Things we keep at home and things we might not leave home without.
In Elie Wiesel’s clear and horrifyingly true story of his family's imprisonment in Auschwitz, Wiesel remembers a prisoner playing a Beethoven sonata on the violin. “Never before had I heard such a beautiful sound. In such silence.” Someone keep a violin in Auschwitz? Grace has a sinister side. Amidst humans marching to gas chambers, a violin holds a note of humanity.
When we keep things close, they catch in our gravity and sit in our orbits. We share forces like power, identity, and memory— things we cannot possibly abandon.
Above all, memory. Little joggers of places, moments, and words that happened. Our past selves, other people.
I keep a small ceramic pot full of waxy orange stamp ink. It was my grandmother’s, bought it in China fifty years ago. When I was young I used to put my finger in it and touch things, spreading beautiful orange, enraging her to no end. Grandma died years ago, but the pot remained in Grandpa’s home. My grandfather died this year, and I requested the pot. A childhood print was still in the ink. A witness of the past.
Writer Dani Shapiro maneuvers us around her nearby precious things in her writing memoir:
My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach, essential oils with names like concentration and focus and inspiration—the kind I might have laughed at when I was younger… All that stuff is there to remind me to stay in the present.
From Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing
I keep a wide orbit of preciousness.
Pictures, stones, beads, an arrowhead, dried flowers, seeds, pine cones, small mirrors, elephant-shaped paperclips, tassels, and things purple. When I moved into my first apartment, my mom packed my precious stuff in a box she labeled “Treasures.” The movers got a kick out of that.
Since moving to England, I’ve collected a few small ceramics. Hard, smooth, always cold with achingly tender widths. They give me comfort. Touch is critical to connecting.
My husband keeps lamb’s ears (Stachys byzantine) in his closet. He touches it absently while choosing a tie. It calms him, the touch and the act of touching. Connecting.
Neurologist Oliver Sacks, a student of broken minds and abundant souls, writes fondly of a rock collection. Not the talismans most of us gather but specific periodic table elements. Minerals, like a bottle of mercury.
I have tended since early boyhood to deal with loss […] by turning to the nonhuman. […] Times of stress throughout my life have led me to turn, or return, to the physical sciences, a world where there is no life but also no death.
From Oliver Sacks’ Gratitude
These precious things we keep nearby hold our vast emotions with ease. They are vessels for the things we can’t carry or abandon. And after we’re gone, they will speak of us.
In an emotional and empathetic exploration of the “human death anxiety,” psychiatrist Irvin Yalom urges connection as a way to overcome our fears of nothingness:
Read more from physicist Alan Lightman, journalist and atheist Christopher Hitchens and my own look at the limits of our knowledge when it comes to death and eternity.
“There is a biological fear that is hardwired into us. I know this fear is inchoate—I’ve experienced it too. It doesn’t have words. But every living creature wishes to persist in its own being.”
We are connected deeply to our precious things because they persist when we cannot. We might not know where we exist beyond death, but we understand these things will persist on earth. This is all perfectly healthy and natural and human.
However, we must ensure these connections don’t stand in for human relationships.
When French travel writer Sylvain Tesson forwent civilization to spend six months in Siberia, he formed strong connections to things. Simple, needless things that suddenly became crucial. Is this because he was missing people?
An object that has been with us through the ups and downs of life takes on substance and a special aura; the years give it a protective patina. To learn to love each one of our poor patrimony of objects, we have to spend a long time with them. […] As the nature of objects reveals itself, I seem to pierce the mysteries of their essence. I love you, bottle…
From Sylvain Tesson’s Consolations of the Forest
I love you, bottle… more than I love anyone else.
In drawers and cupboards, on desktops and shelves, in pockets and purses, precious things we keep nearby. They require nothing but place and give us memory, calmness, comfort, and infinite, welcoming capacity.
I love
all things,
not because they are
passionate
or sweet-smelling
but because,
I don’t know,
because this ocean is yours,
and mine:
and these buttons
and wheels
and little
forgotten
treasures, fans upon
whose feathers
love has scattered
its blossoms,
glasses, knives and
scissors-
all bear
the trace
of someone’s fingers
on their handle or surface,
the trace of a distant hand
lost
in the depths of forgetfulness.
From Pablo Neruda’s Ode to Things
They don’t, however, give us each other.
“Darling, I now have a butter dish shaped like a cow,” Leonard Cohen announces almost wistfully in his poetic collection of love and sorrow.
I too have a cow-shaped crockery. A white ceramic creamer. One of the precious things I keep nearby is a memory of something. Like all ceramics, it’s always cold.
