If there’s a God-of-the-Gaps, used to explain what science can’t, there must be a God-of-Objects. There’s something about objects that intrigues. If you gaze at one—a wrench, a cheese grater, a paper clip—with rapt attention, after twenty minutes you’ll be worn out and have to take a nap. Czesław Miłosz published an anthology called A Book of Luminous Things. William Matthews said if an object fails to interest us, it’s not its fault but our own. As proof, he offered, “How easily happiness begins by / dicing onions.” Francis Ponge exclaimed, “O infinite resources of the thickness of things.”
We try to diminish their clout by calling them stuff and clutter. But so much, we know, depends upon a wheelbarrow, an elastic band, a toothpick, a jar in Tennessee. The God-of-Objects, cousin to the God-of-the-Gaps, can be sensed sometimes, a solid otherness that makes us shiver, a there-ness that defies comparison, an almost hidden radiance that refuses to be ignored, though we ignore it every day. Someone’s father dies and leaves a drawer of ballpoint pens. Someone keeps the bowl in which her mother kneaded bread dough, a big white bowl too heavy for her to lift from the upper cupboard shelf.
Things outlast us, even the fragile—an Etruscan pitcher, a thousand-year-old piece of glass from the Tang Dynasty, Trotsky’s spectacles, which fell to his desk and cracked when the climbing axe struck the back of his head. Soon enough we’ll join the ranks of what endures—ashes scraped into a plastic sack or a mute articulation of many bones.