As an anthropologist interested in human experiences, I've always been captivated by children's imagination and creativity and the way they approach everyday objects.
Children can come up with amazing stories about practically anything that comes their way. For example, a fork can suddenly become a fishing tackle and Poseidon's pitchfork, a spoon in a soup can be a ship conquering the expanses of the ocean, and a cardboard box can be a future balloon basket.
As people age, they gradually lose their inventiveness and creativity, and objects return to their original function so that the fork becomes just a fork again, and the spoon just a spoon, and people can hardly remember that they once saw a lot of other meanings in all these objects.
However, there are exceptions to this rule. In this article, I'd like to tell about an author who had a talent for unearthing surprising, romantic meanings in simple things from a young age and retained this skill throughout his life.
Walter Benjamin: An Explorer on a Quest to Discover Hidden Worlds
Walter Benjamin was a well-known German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and writer who wrote extensively on cities, aesthetics, art, and human perception. In one of his books, "Berlin Childhood Around 1900", he captured many amazing lyrical stories about his own childhood and his perception of the ordinary.
“Berlin Childhood” is a recollection of Benjamin’s childhood experiences in a Berlin Jewish home at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this book, he focuses not so much on events or people, but rather on places, objects, and pieces of furniture, exposing unexpected poetry in the midst of mundane everyday reality. As he put it , “I’d like to write something that comes from things the way wine comes from grapes” (Benjamin, On Hashish).
Unearthing Poetry in the Mundane
In young Benjamin's world, mysteries abound. He poses himself as an explorer on a quest to discover hidden worlds. For example, in "Hiding Places," he describes an Easter egg hunt at his apartment where "the house was an arsenal of masks. But once a year in secret places, in the empty eye sockets of the masks, in their rigid mouths, lay presents. Magical experience became science. I disenchanted the gloomy parental dwelling, as its engineer, and went looking for Easter eggs" (p. 100).
Another captivating example is his description of the buffet in the dining room, which he refers to as "a sacred mountain sheltering a temple" and “a show of treasures”:
...the gloomiest of all domestic furnishings in those days was the buffet. Indeed, to know what a dining room really was, to grasp its lugubrious mystery, one had to have managed at some point to gauge the disproportion between the doorway and the broad, massive buffet that rose to the ceiling. [...]
The cleaning lady, who depopulated everything around her, could not get at it. The silver pitchers and soup tureens, the delft vases and the majolica, the bronze urns and crystal goblets—which were kept in its niches and under its shell-shaped canopies, on its several shelves and ledges, between its doors and in front of its paneling—were the only things she could carry away and pile up in the next room. The forbidding heights from which they reigned made them unfit for any practical use. The buffet thus bore a well-deserved resemblance to a sacred mountain sheltering a temple. (Chapter “Cabinets”, p.157)
However, the chapter that probably best reflects his talent for mystifying the mundane is the "Sewing Box". In this chapter, W. Benjamin describes his mother’s sewing table and sewing box in their Berlin apartment.
… Like all seats of authority, her place at the sewing table had its air of magic. From time to time, I got a taste of this. Holding my breath, I would stand there motionless within the charmed circle. [...] because what was being done to me stood in no proper relation to the multicolored array of silken remnants, the thin sharp needles, and the scissors long and short that lay before me. I began to question whether the box was really meant for sewing in the first place.
In addition to the upper region of the box, where the spindles nestled side by side, where the black needlebook glimmered and the scissors lay sheathed in their leather pockets, there was the dark underground, the chaos, in which the loosened ball of thread reigned supreme, and in which pieces of elastic bands, hooks, eyes, and scraps of silk were jumbled together. (pp. 111-114)
Lessons in Imagination and Creativity
This was just a short glimpse into the magical world of Walter Benjamin's childhood as captured in his book "Berlin Childhood Around 1900". This book has many more stories like this that remind that ordinary objects can take on extraordinary significance when seen through a child's eyes.
In today's fast-paced world, where we are constantly bombarded with information and distractions, it can be challenging to tap into our inner child and explore the wonders that surround us. However, taking the time to appreciate everyday objects and see them in a new light can be a rewarding experience.
So next time you come across an item like an old cupboard, a fork or a box, take a moment to appreciate the extra meanings that they may hold. Who knows, you might just uncover a hidden story or a new perspective on the world around you!
Sources
Benjamin, W. (2006). Berlin childhood around 1900. Harvard University Press.
Benjamin, W. (2006). On Hashish. (H. Eiland & M. W. Jennings, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
The Creativity Workshop. (n.d.). Creative geniuses: Our favorite quotes. Retrieved February 20, 2023, from https://creativityworkshop.com/articles/creative-geniuses
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