Some objects carry the trace of everyone who’s cared about them, and it only happens in the analog world.
Any issue of The Atlantic that arrives containing a piece by Caity Weaver is a treat to be gobbled up and then re-read and savored. She is a cornucopian writer, like Erasmus in the Dutch Renaissance, who delights in lists, comparisons, nuance, and making thoughtful judgments. Weaver is also hilarious: she is in deep, intimate, and accepting contact with the posse of neuroses that attend her writing like an entourage. I celebrated her magnum opus, My Quest to Find America’s Best Free Bread, in a previous Dispatch; if you haven’t yet read it you should. Immediately.
Weaver’s latest, Cheap Thrills: The whimsy, weirdness, and heartbreak of secondhand shopping, in the July Atlantic, explores three ways that Americans get to spy on each other by looking at other people’s stuff at garage sales, thrift stores, and estate sales. It’s the third category where Weaver shows that behind the wry observations lies an insightful mind and a big heart:
In a bedroom closet in Bernalillo, on a shelf bearing a gray-haired wig and wig shampoo, I find a government card dated five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, stating that the cardholder, a resident of Kansas, is eligible to defer his draft by reason of hardship to his dependents. The woman ringing up my Christmas decorations lets me have it for free.
Without Weaver, that government card—which a recently deceased woman held onto for 85 years—would have wound up in the garbage. Weaver preserved, for at least another few years, the government card’s aura.
“Aura” is a term I first encountered in the early Twentieth Century critic Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” For Benjamin, singular works of art (like da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”) had aura while posters of “Mona Lisa” did not. Aura accumulates around an object over time. For Benjamin, who was a terrible snob, aura is only important around works of art, but that is sadly limiting.
An object’s aura is the byproduct of attention that more than one person has paid to that object. A mass produced coffee mug has no aura. But a handmade coffee mug that its creator, Mike Miles, signed on May 16, 2017, and that later, somehow, wound up in a Salt Lake City thrift store? That mug has aura, even if it is weaker than the aura of a da Vinci painting, a sculpture by Rodin, the Empire State Building, or the star sapphire ring that I inherited from my grandfather Jack Baker and that I plan to leave to my grandson if I’m lucky enough to have one. (No pressure, kids. Honest.)
In Weaver’s essay, the difference between garage sales and thrift stores on one hand and estate sales on the other is that when we sell or give our things away we are dislocating them from our own history (although not always completely, see the Mike Miles mug story) and releasing them into the history of strangers. Estate sales are different because acquirers visit objects that are still embedded in their history, even if only for a short time. As buyers dislocate a dead person’s possessions from their context, aura leaks through their fingers like mist and evaporates into the air… except when somebody like Caity Weaver preserves that aura, a stay of execution, by holding onto a piece of paper that was precious to the owner in an indescribable but haunting way.
Aura is a keyword for me because it helps to get at why things—physical objects that we touch, carry around, visit, or leave at home—matter.
Aura is the flip side of experience stacks (another of my key concepts). An experience stack describes the foundation on which a person builds an improvisational, associative, idiosyncratic and ephemeral experience. Aura connects different people across time who share an experience of an object. Associations pool around objects over the years where different people share moments of reality about which they can agree: that’s a statue, that’s a signed first edition of a book, that’s a hand-knitted blanket. (We agree on so little, these days.)
Aura is analog, not digital.
A digital object, whether a work of art or something else, has no aura because there is no original to accumulate it. Every copy of a video game is the same. Every copy of a digital photo is the same. Sure, you can edit the photo, but then every copy of that photo is the same.
In our always-on digital lives, our minds go whitewater rafting down endless algorithmically confected experiences. It’s possible to stop, to get off the raft, but it’s impossible to go back upriver to revisit something you whizzed past. Even if you bookmark a page, it’s likely to have changed by the time you click.
We are, in other words, in an aura drought.
This is one reason why I stopped buying fountain pens online. The pens that mean something to me are the ones I bought from an expert in a store, like the heavy, stainless steel Faber-Castell I bought from Pascale at Creutz & Fils in Nice a few days ago, a shop that has stood on the same spot since 1896:
Even though my pen is new, it is already accumulating a tiny bit of aura. That aura is personal right now, but one day this durable pen will belong to somebody else, and if that person knows who I am (or was), that aura will connect us across time and space, even if only a little.
And that matters.
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* Image Prompt: It took three iterations before I got it where I wanted it: 1. “A woman’s hand gently pulls a government card that reads “Draft Deferral: July 1941” out of a bank of mist that would otherwise have consumed it.” 2. “Make the woman’s hand much younger–she is in her 40s–and make the picture 4×4.” 3. “Make the mist heavier, but do not obscure the writing or the hand.”
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