I do note that there are no comments allowed over there, and I suspect that's because readers would harp on the cause for cancellation and fail to discuss the essay itself.
Which, now that I think about it, is exactly what I'm doing.
I own a cuddly tortoise sewn by my mother, which she gave me when I was 7. It has a floral shell, a red underbelly and black felt eyes. Even though I’m notoriously prone to losing things, I’ve managed to keep hold of that tortoise through sundry house moves and even changes of country. My mother died over 30 years ago, so I’ve now lived more of my life without her than with her. I find more comfort in that tortoise than I do in photographs of her, which are now so faded and dated, and emphasize how long she’s been gone. What consoles me is the permanence of the object she made — its unchanging nature, its stolid three-dimensional reality. I’d give up many of my possessions to keep that tortoise, the few exceptions being things that have their own allusive power, like my wedding ring....
She has a new book, we learn, "The Christmas Pig" — "a story of objects lost and found, of things beloved and things unregretted."
It's the day before Christmas. Are you thinking about things — things to give and receive, to want and not want?
How powerfully do you imbue things with magic — or do you have anything going amongst your possessions that you could even vaguely term "magic"?
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In January 1994 the Northridge earthquake shook so many glasses, cups, etc. out of my cupboards and onto my floor that it put a big dent in the way I thought of the importance of things in my life. Things made or given with love, especially the love of a lost parent, may, however, be more significant; and beloved childhood possessions, too. Magic is too strong a word, though (at least for a dyed-in-the-wool atheist like me). At the end of the film "Red Dragon" Hannibal Lecter says in a letter to Will Graham: "Our scars have the power to remind us that the past was real." I suppose Rowling's turtle does that for her, and it's more dependently present than the scent of Madelines.
Isn't it amazing that she always seems to get into the headlines regularly whenever she is selling a product.
FWIW, NYTimes has shut down comments on most 'guest essays' on the Editorial page for months now. See also Joseph Allen's essay about COVID early this week.
Isn't it amazing that she always seems to get into the headlines regularly whenever she is selling a product.
FWIW, NYTimes has shut down comments on most 'guest essays' on the Editorial page for months now. See also Joseph Allen's essay about COVID early this week.
My son passed the California Bar and now practices law at a good sized labor law firm. For Christmas I’m giving him the official tie for the Middle Inn Temple in London. It is a beautiful red and silver repp tie from Ben Silver.
By nature, I’m sentimental about the objects associated with important points in my life. Knick-knacks, baubles, stuff that that I keep for the memories. But there were a couple periods where I lost nearly all my possessions. What I learned from the experience is, no matter how important those things seemed to me when I had them, I didn’t miss them much or at all when they were gone. They’re just stuff. I can, and did, get more stuff.
In my technical writing class in college (at which I totally sucked and passed w/a D)(-), I chose to write on the workings of my stuffed horse, April. Complete w/a labeled drawing- worn ear, tail rubbed off etc. of course, the teacher hated it.
JK Rowling is a very special person. She survived adversity and “persevered”. Her magic is in memories.
“Our scars have the power to remind us that the past was real.”
“Our scars have the power to remind us that we can heal.”
FIFY :0)
If you call a felt bag full of stuffing a "tortoise," does it magically become one?
When asked by my mother (age 97.75) what things in her house would I like to inherit (I have a brother and a sister), I immediately named a cheap cookie jar with a pig’s head. It brings back wonderful childhood memories of receiving a treat from the jar of my mother’s cookies. It represents her love and personal investment in caring for me as a child. I suppose there is an element of magic in that. She kept the jar out of reach (first on the counter then on top of the refrigerator when we got taller) so we also had to ask for a cookie. Her giving me a cookie or two, usually along with a glass of milk, is part of the magic. She baked the cookies when we were in school so another magical element was to discover the kind of cookie in the jar.
I picked up a flint hand axe while wading in a stream at a Buddhist retreat. It was probably used by Paleo-Indians around 12,000 years ago. Given my state of mind at the time that I found it, and where I was, it holds some magic for me. It was under the water and I noticed the shiny tan surface of it which was different than the other rocks I was seeing. I didn't noticed that it had been fashioned into a shape until I got it back to the cabin and looked it over better. It's about six inches long and weighs a few lbs.
I don't know that I have any childhood objects that I can elevate to majic.
I have a bookcase shelf in my home office dedicated to sentimental gifts, many provided by my children, others picked up during travel, and a few from other family members and friends. All are small. There are stone discsand fossil shrimp, a jade crab, a coffee mug, a small statue of a flying blue monkey, a wooden St. Benedict, a brass Humpty Dumpty, and so on. None of it means anything to anyone on earth except me and perhaps, if they even remember it, the person who gave it to me. I would not mourn if they all were lost, but I look up from working at my desk and let one or another catch my eye once in a while, just to remind me there are things other than work.
On second thought, the flying blue monkey from Oz is handmade and unique and can't be replaced, so I'd be sad to lose it. The jade crab, not so much.
Life is magical. We know it begins, it ends, and assume a functional in between.
Consciousness is magical. We assume a correlation with a coherent nervous system until its entropic conclusion.
The first heart beat is magical.
Sexual reproduction is magical, where a man and woman contribute equally in whole and kind to the conception and evolution of a human life that is novel in color and character.
Rowling is saying people can bring meaning to things; things alone can't bring being meaning to people.
That's the magic.
My wife saved my first swim medal for 7th place 25-yd backstroke, 3 and under for a So Cal AAU Championship. Earned it at the Beverly Hills High School pool that lived beneath a retractable basketball court. The school had operating oil pump jacks on the front lawn. The award is a reminder of my greatest lesson in humility. I won my heat and thought I won 1st place for the event. I was so excited jumping up and down when my mom told me coldly that there were four more heats of faster kids, so no, you didn't win and will be lucky to medal because I out swam my seed time.
It's nice to have, but I didn't know it still existed until after my Dad died. I always thought about that experience whenever it felt like I "hit a home run". A talisman seems superfluous but I am also glad the old man saved my Sr yearbook as well.
Reminds me that I need to Kondoize after New Years.
It's magic because a Talisman can transport your thoughts to a different time and place. Like an old song is magical.
I much prefer the word enchanted, rather than magic. There are so many things I unpack from Christmas bins that conjure tender memories as I decorate the house. Christmas was a singular spectacular at our house — there’s no way I could re create it. A formal Christmas Eve buffet, and I do mean formal, and then another grand meal on Christmas Day— ther e are two one inch tall wooden angels that never fail to bring tears to my eyes. One is playing the violin, the other the cello. They’re from the sixties. Mom had a whole set of these, each playing a different musical Instrument, scattered about the Christmas table. In 2015, after my dad died, I took all of his fine Christmas tartans— pants, blazers, scarves— and made patchwork Christmas stockings for each of his grandchildren. I wanted to somehow transmit that enchantment, to hold on to it…isn’t that what we’re all looking for, what we long for? Because we are made to live with God. These moments of enchantment are but a foretaste, but so very important to curate, and particularly Woman’s province.
Merry Christmas to the awesomely erudite Althouse community! And thank you, Ann Althouse, for another year of engaging posts. I don’t know how you do it.
We attended Jazz Fest in New Orleans the year after Katrina. At the Jimmy Buffett concert, a family near us was swaying and dancing and... inexplicably passing a steam iron around to one another. When the concert was over, we asked them, "What's with the iron?"
It was the only remnant of their household that they had been able to salvage when their home was flooded. It had, they said, talismanic power for them.
Getting ready for a will update. As the youngest, I may be the youngest of my siblings to survive so I decided to add a list of things I would like saved somewhere in the family. It's surprising to me how few things made the list.
The Nativity Set we had since childhood. It came from Woolworths and there are no Wise Men because my parents could not afford them. The figures are made of some kind of resin and, according to the stamp on the bottom, the sheep cost 8 cents each. Something that looks like a big wooden box with wheels but is actually the locker my grandfather used in World War II. He was 53 when he went in the Seabees. His first name was Adolph and he felt the need to serve where he could. He actually had no children of his own but my Mom always called him Dad while calling her biological Dad by his first name.
Of my own possessions I only came up with two so far. One is an Amish made rocker I bought with an early paycheck. It is a great baby rocking chair. No other reason - it is just comfortable. The last is the strangest. A little over 50 years ago, I was chosen to be in a high school advanced math class. Because of an administrative glitch, the first group of us had to stay together in math (trig, calculus, etc) for 4 years. No new people replaced the old when someone dropped. We had a book of tables we used to do math problems (which now could be found on a relative cheap calculator). I don't honestly know why I have kept the book this long but every time I move, it goes with me.
I can honestly say that there isn’t a non-essential thing that has much of a hold on me. Sure, there are things I like, things that have fond memories, things that remind me of the love of my departed parents, things that fascinate me. But if I lost them tomorrow, I’d forget about them the day after.
Not because of my Gandhi-esque spiritual detachment from the material, but simply from watching fools and nutters wreck themselves and their relationships in pursuit of things.
Memories are magic - we tell stories about my mother-in-law and can laugh or cry or just feel comfort in the having none here.
Recipes are magic - when we make them and remember who taught us, and feel good about the doing.
She wrote 'losing' instead of 'loosing' so you know she's a good writer : )
"Isn't it amazing that she always seems to get into the headlines regularly whenever she is selling a product."
If you look more carefully, a lot of headlines are about people trying to sell something.
I always thought the lines in Sammy Cahn's Christmas Waltz that go
"Santa's on his way
He's filled his sleigh with things
Things for you and for me"
were a weak point in the song, lacking specificity, but maybe I'm wrong.
The magic of things may be that they can be so satisfying when present, yet disappear with scarcely a pang. Not like people. I don't miss any of the thousand-and-three "essential" things I've lost down the years. I may have forgotten a few, or hundreds, so thoroughly forgotten I don't even remember forgetting. But aren't a few lost things bright in memory? Or is it the memories are bright, the things just serviceable in recalling them?
The graveyards, they say, are full of indispensable men. Then the windrows and middens are full of lost essential things. A thought for this sparkling Christmastime. What could I wish for?
Ursula K. LeGuin wrote a short story titled "Things." It wasn't about purple, three-eyed, tentacled creatures from outer space, but about the kind of things we are talking about here -- irreplaceable things. Lost things. I remember it as a very quiet, wistful end-of-the-world story, where everyone knew the end was coming and just set about putting things bleakly in order.
I have an engraved replica of the One Ring. I have a Vegvesir medallion. That is the extent of my magic item collection.
By the time I was in my mid 20s, I had suffered terrible personal setbacks caused by myself. So, I got myself a bicycle, camping gear, and a one-way ticket to London, intending to ride across Europe. (Before, I had never biked, camped, nor been to Europe.) I returned from Crete with a diary. I can't say that I have ever looked at it since. To me, it is magic. I can't say if its magic is good or ill.
The beauty of Rowling's stories (along with Tolkien and Lewis) is that they help us imagine material things as enchanted again after centuries of scientific naturalism has drained matter of enchantment.
My wife has a yuge collection of tree ornaments from her family and mine, and uses about 20% of them. Even so, they cover the tree thickly, and she can tell you when and how most of them were acquired.
We have a house full of furniture, half or more inherited, but the only things I care about are the books, cds, and family effects, especially my father's scrapbooks. I don't have a particular Christmas gift memory, or stuffed animal totem.
My last brother said he had found a cache of old family photos, long missing, among the hoarded stuff in the house we moved into in 1960 and I moved out of in about '73. If he brings them over tomorrow, that's all the gifts I could want.
The other day my wife and I made a batch of her killer fudge, and it was so good we had to make some more last night, along with the chocolate crinkle (36 large) and butter-almond (48 ct.) cookies to her mother's old recipes. She'll put together some little plates for a few of the neighbors, maybe.
Merry Christmas.
I'm not a big fantasy fan anymore; I'm now more into history and biographies. But when I was young I read a lot of Sci-Fi and some fantasy. Lord of the Rings was the greatest. I still read Lord of the Rings every decade or half decade or so, most recently last year or perhaps the year before, maybe the 8th or 10th time. I've read all of C.S. Lewis's fantasies. I also read anything new from Peter S. Beagle. So when my granddaughters got into the Harry Potter books, I thought I ought to read them. I did. When I was in Basic Training all I was able to drink was 3.2 beer, and that's what Harry Potter was to me. But these books won't do anyone any harm.
Sure, it would be nice to say that I was above all that, but things matter a lot to me, now that I have to downsize and get rid of them. If you don't keep your imagination under control, you can lose yourself in where something came from, how it got to you or someone you know, and how it managed to survive all this time. Eventually I can get rid of stuff, but there is this wonder or mystery in finding, say, your parents' report cards and yearbooks or matches from a long-closed restaurant they used to go to. I guess we hang on to things as a substitute for relationships and experiences or because we can't turn the memories into something creative of our own, but that doesn't lesson the romance.
My brother didn't bring the old photos, or we'd still be in the living room now looking through them. Probably for the best, since I can take time later out there, or bring them here for leisurely perusal.
One of my past-times is estate sales, where I pick up good deals on books, cds, and the occasional artwork or bit of militaria. It is really depressing, all the houses full of so much of the same unsellable-at-any-price dishes, clothes, furniture, and yard tools.
Two feet behind me I have a two big plastic bins with assorted clippings, photos, and memorabilia that I brought here when my mother died in '18. There is a small packet of letters she and my father wrote each other in 1947 (I think) when she and some girlfriends were making a Western road trip, and I guess my father was back here finishing his interrupted college education. I don't think they were engaged, and have no idea how remote this trip was from their first date--the one when she thought he was the biggest jerk she'd ever been out with, and her a noted campus beauty too.
Can't ask now!
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