“Things Have a Way of Insinuating Themselves into All Human Lives”

After World War II was followed by a scarcity of thing-essays the recent decades have witnessed their resurgence. Elizabeth Bowen’s transformative “The Teakettle” (1963) describes how teapots are associated with the glamours of teatime, while the dirty teakettles that actually prepared the tea remain hidden in the kitchen. This master-servant-relationship provides an allegory for human relationships of exploitation. Bruce Chatwin’s meta-reflective “The Morality of Things” (1973) describes human existence as a constant struggle between nomadism and a tendency to gather things. Geoff Dyer’s “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition” (2009) seeks to transform a doughnut into a guarantor for mental well-being until the item refuses this semantic overcharging. An even stronger resistance in objects is described in Lucy Ellmann’s meta-reflective “Things are Against Us” (2021), which, however, also points out how human beings abuse things.