The Book of Things
“A relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value – that is, their usefulness – but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate…”
-Walter Benjamin, Unpacking my Library
In her 1966 essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion attributes the process of gathering to “a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” The Book of Things is the anarchic inevitability of just such a rearragement: an impossible archive, a solipsistic internet, an alternative history, a private infrastructure of patterns and reminders, a fascination with coincidence, a vulnerability to metaphor, and a maximalist obsession with material objects.
The Book of Things gives way to something about confusing cause with effect, something about dreaming away the difference between lying down and standing, and “something simple and magical,” as Borges defines eternity in Historia de la Eternidad, “an attempt at the simultaneity of the three tenses.” Borges credits nostalgia for providing humans the imagination to conceive of eternity. “In passion,” he writes, “memory inclines towards the intemporal. We gather up all the delights of a given past in a single image; the diversely red sunsets I watch every evening will in memory be a single sunset.” Although I am not one to dismiss Borges, I would disagree that eternity is a concept exclusive to retrospect. I am nostalgic for things as I am doing them, and for things I have not done yet. It is not only in memory but also in experience that what I do may be comparable to a single sunset.
Tess Edmonson
2011
