If I choose to pick up this small white cup with its single chip near the handle, will it figure in my life?" De Waal believes the way objects are handed on has as much to do with storytelling as happenstance. Things do "retain the pulse of their making" and this intrigues him: "There is a breath of hesitancy before touching or not touching, a strange moment. In his memoir, de Waal alludes early on to the existential hum some objects emit. As an ever-present metaphor for human endeavour, I fear they would slowly drive me mad. I find them exquisite, but I'm not sure that I would ever want to own a row. This is what they say: that the potter may throw any shape he likes that no two of his pots will ever be precisely the same and that a pot may disappear – crash! – in an instant. His bowls and beakers, thrown in porcelain and glazed in celadon, are domestic, – in theory, you could fill them with hot tea – but they also exist in a more contemplative realm arranged in pale lines and marked by various dents and asymmetries, they whisper a story of limitless but rather fragile possibility. E dmund de Waal is a potter, perhaps the most famous potter working in Britain today.
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