Purposes Served

“These things have served their purpose: let them be.” – T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

A hand-hewn rosewood chest stands in the corner of our bedroom. It holds a small collection of artifacts my parents brought back from years of mission work at a school for orphans in South India. The chest is, itself, one of those artifacts: the boys at the mission school made it from a felled tree on the property.

As a child I heard many of Mom’s mission talks at churches, always punctuated by a showing and sharing of objects. She would hold up a small brass oil lamp and tell what effort it took for a village woman to obtain even the small amount of oil required to light the lamp to cook by. She would drape long garlands made of cloves or wax beads around a willing listener’s neck and talk about how much celebration mattered even—or especially—to the very poor who do without things they need to honor guests on important occasions. She would ask me to hold one end of a long sari, full of gaping holes and badly stitched patches, darkened by time and weather, as she told about a beggar woman who had no other clothing than this heart-rending rag until Mom brought her a new sari from the mission and asked for this one in return. For years that sari remained for me a searing image of what poverty looked like.

The lamp, the beads, the sari, and reed fans and broadsheets full of curled Tamil letters lie quietly in the rosewood chest now, only very occasionally brought out to show family folk. They have served their purposes, first for the villagers who made and used them and then for my parents for whom they became teaching tools and for the parishioners whose imaginations they awakened. And they served my purposes—those I was aware of at the time, and those I came to recognize only later: they allowed me access into lives lived thousands of miles and many cultural corridors away. They helped me question the comforts and insularity of my suburban American life.

These days the articles in the chest have mostly “sentimental value.” For the daughters and grandchildren who inherit them they will perhaps carry only a vague scent of the past–quaint reminders of an adventurous life once lived whose story left traces on theirs.

When I stop at estate sales (as I do, sometimes veering far off course from Saturday morning errands) T.S. Eliot’s poignant line comes back to me again: “These things have served their purpose. Let them be.” The admonition applies widely. The homemade quilt, now frayed, that someone is selling because no one remembers who made it; the watercolor by a family friend that someone will buy because she wants the frame; the china tea set most will overlook because so few serve tea—and certainly not in that fashion—all have price tags, though we know the price is negotiable. All these things have served their purposes, and belong mostly to another time. They connect us to the dead, and to elders growing more distant as they descend into dementia or drowsiness or illness and quiet indifference. They connect us to a past we can’t afford entirely to forget because it reminds us of what we have traded for the conveniences, the variety, the incessant connectedness, the speed, and the bewildering choices we live with now. And they evoke salutary curiosity about how people lived with so little artificial light or heavy clothing in humid summers or pens that needed to be filled.

Once in a while a stray object may lead us, to quote Eliot again, to a “shocking valuation of all we have been and done.” And so we sort them, reconsider them, reuse or “repurpose” them, sell them or pass them along with slight guilt for making it someone else’s business to dispose of them “properly.” Maybe, when the flotsam of a former generation falls into our hands, it would be good to receive it as an invitation to imagine, if only for a few passing moments, the purposes it served, why it mattered to someone to make, buy, or use it, to make it beautiful, to keep it, and to pass it on. Whether we keep it or let it go, if we let old objects raise questions, evoke stories, or give us moments of gratitude for what is passed from generation to generation, we may find ourselves surprised by unexpected satisfactions, whether we put them to new uses or simply let them be.