A Love for Things

I like to think romantically about things sometimes, in the sense that objects can be transcendent, can possess meaning and occupy a lasting place of importance and value in our lives outside of their cost or mere objective utility. Not all things, woefully few perhaps, bring forth this feeling readily, though with focus and attention we can find it anywhere. I’ve always sought out objects that help foster this feeling that Martin Buber expresses eloquently in his Book I and Thou:

I consider a tree.

I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a chock of light, or a splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background.

I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with the earth and air—and the obscure growth itself.

I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life.

I can subdue its actual presence and for so sternly that I recognize it only as an expression of law—of the laws in accordance with which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or of those in accordance with which a the component substances mingle and separate.

I can can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number, in pure numerical relation.

In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and his its nature and constitution.

It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness.

To effect this it is not necessary for me to give up any of the ways which I consider the tree. There is nothing from which I would would have to turn my eyes away in order to see, and no knowledge that I would have to forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and type, law and number, indivisibly united in this event.

Everything belonging to the tree is in this: its form and structure, its colors and chemical composition, it’s intercourse with the elements and with the stars, are all present in a single whole.

The the tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as with it—only in a different way.

Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of the relation: relation is mutual.

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Things matter as much as we let them. We should find things for our lives that foster the relational, that remind us of the deeper connections that can exist