"And I'm not entitled to nostalgia about all that lost wealth and glamour from a century ago. And I am not interested in 'thin'. I want to know what the relationship has been between this wooden object that I am rolling between my fingers - hard and tricky and Japanse - and where it has been. I want to be able to reach to the handle of the door and turn it and feel it open. I want to walk into each room where this object has lived, to feel the volume of space, to know what pictures were on the walls, how the light fell from the windows. And I want to know whose hands it has been in, and what they felt about it and thought about it - if they thought about it. I want to know what it has witnessed."
Edmund de Waal, 'The hare with amber eyes. A hidden inheritance' (2010), 15-16.
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