Saturday, November 5, 2022

Memorable paragraph from Glenn Adamson’s “Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects”:

Interestingly, young people do seem to realize that they are missing out on something. My brother’s family lives in Munich, but last summer they came to see me in New York. During their visit, I noticed that my fifteen-year-old niece, Sophia, had set up a framed photograph of her cat Pepper next to her improvised bed in the living room. She had brought it with her all the way from Germany. I was surprised and asked her why she had bothered. Didn’t she have pictures of the cat on her phone? She replied in a way that was as perceptive as it was tongue-twisting. “Yes, but I want a picture of Pepper. And the point of the phone is not to show a picture of Pepper, while the point of the picture of Pepper is to be a picture of Pepper."