Evocative Objects: Things We Think With
Wildstead Library No. 007
Edited by Sherry Turkle
Why It’s Here
Some objects simply belong to us. Others become part of the way we remember our lives.
Evocative Objects begins with that distinction. Edited by Sherry Turkle, the collection considers the relationships we develop with ordinary physical things and the surprising amount of memory, identity, emotion, and thought they can eventually contain.
It earns a place in the Wildstead Library because Wildstead has always been interested in the difference between simply possessing something and having something worth keeping.
About the Book
Turkle brings together a collection of writers, scholars, scientists, artists, and designers, each considering an object that has acquired particular significance in his or her life. The objects range from the familiar to the unexpected: a cello, a rolling pin, a laptop, a suitcase, a camera, a yellow raincoat, even a 1964 Ford Falcon.
The individual objects aren't really the subject for long. Instead, they become starting points for considering memory, family, work, loss, creativity, identity, and the ways physical things help us understand experiences that can otherwise be difficult to articulate.
That makes Evocative Objects less a book about possessions than a collection of reflections about the peculiar relationship between the material world and the interior one.
The Wildstead Perspective
We live in an age that tends to offer two competing messages about possessions. One encourages us to continually acquire more. The other suggests enlightenment might be found by getting rid of nearly everything.
There is a quieter possibility between the two.
Some things deserve to stay.
A watch worn through years of travel becomes different from the watch that originally came out of its box. A battered cooking utensil can contain more family history than something carefully preserved behind glass. An old chair may be objectively inferior to its replacement and still be the one nobody wants to throw away.
Use changes things. So does time. Eventually the scratches, repairs, stains and imperfections become part of an object's history—and sometimes part of ours.
Perhaps the more useful question isn't how much we own, but whether we understand why we keep what we keep.
Who Will Enjoy It
Evocative Objects will appeal to readers interested in design, material culture, psychology, memory, craftsmanship, collecting, and the emotional lives of everyday things. Its essay format also makes it a book that can be read slowly, one object and one perspective at a time.
It will particularly resonate with anyone who has ever tried to explain why an apparently ordinary possession could never quite be replaced by another one.
Why It Belongs
Wildstead is interested in things made well enough to endure, but endurance alone isn't what gives an object meaning.
Meaning accumulates.
It comes from where something has been, who gave it to us, what we did with it, what happened while we had it, and sometimes simply from the fact that it remained while other parts of life changed around it.
Evocative Objects belongs in the Wildstead Library because it asks us to look more carefully at the physical things that accompany a life—and to recognize that occasionally an ordinary object becomes something considerably more than a possession.
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