"The Hare with Amber Eyes"

Reading Edmund de Waal's art memoir closely following "H is For Hawk" makes me marvel at Britain's knack of producing fine writers with eccentric passions in the physical.

• Each sound of a paper screen closing or of water across stones in the garden of a tea-house was an epiphany, just as each neon Dunkin’ Donuts store gave me a moue of disquiet.
• Yanagi, a philosopher, art historian and poet, had evolved a theory of why some objects – pots, baskets, cloth made by unknown craftsmen – were so beautiful. In his view, they expressed unconscious beauty because they had been made in such numbers that the craftsman had been liberated from his ego.
• I liked the way that repetition wears things smooth, and there was something of the river stone to Iggie’s stories.
• And Emmy pulling him to the window at breakfast to show him an autumnal tree outside the dining-room window covered in goldfinches. And how when he knocked on the window and they flew, the tree was still blazing golden.
• There is another of a cooper working on a half-finished barrel with an adze. He sits leaning into it, framed by it, brows puckered with concentration. It is an ivory carving about what it is like to carve into wood. Both are about finishing something on the subject of the half-finished. Look, they say, I got there first and he’s hardly started.
• Some of the netsuke are studies in running movement, so that your fingers move along a surface of uncoiling rope, or spilt water. Others have small congested movements that knot your touch: a girl in a wooden bath, a vortex of clam shells. Some do both, surprising you: an intricately ruffled dragon leans against a simple rock. You work your fingers round the smoothness and stoniness of the ivory to meet this sudden density of dragon.
• It is a quiet one, undemonstrative, but it makes me smile. Making something to hold out of a very hard material that feels so soft is a slow and rather good tactile pun.
• but I really don’t want to get into the sepia saga business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss.
• Melancholy, I think, is a sort of default vagueness, a get-out clause, a smothering lack of focus. And this netsuke is a small, tough explosion of exactitude. It deserves this kind of exactitude in return.
• I can remember the weight and the balance of a pot, and how its surface works with its volume. I can read how an edge creates tension or loses it. I can feel if it has been made at speed or with diligence. If it has warmth. I can see how it works with the objects that sit nearby. How it displaces a small part of the world around it.
• A simple object, this cup that is more ivory than white, too small for morning coffee, not quite balanced, could become part of my life of handled things. It could fall away into the territory of personal story-telling; the sensuous, sinuous intertwining of things with memories. A favoured, favourite thing. Or I could put it away. Or I could pass it on. How objects are handed on is all about story-telling.
• There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten? There can be a chain of forgetting, the rubbing away of previous ownership as much as the slow accretion of stories.
• ... feel slightly sickened by how poised it sounds. I hear myself entertaining them, and the story echoes back in their reactions. It isn’t just getting smoother, it is getting thinner.
• There is something musical in this kind of elevation. You take classical elements and try to bring them into rhythmic life: four Corinthian pilasters rising up to pace the façade, four massive stone urns on the parapet, five storeys high, eight windows wide.
• I duck through the passageway to a courtyard, then through another arch to a stable block of red brick with servants’ quarters above; a pleasing diminuendo of materials and textures.
• If this particular house in this particular streetscape seems a little stagey, it is because it is a staging of intent.
• Odessa was a city within the Pale of Settlement, the area on the western borders of imperial Russia in which Jews were allowed to live. It was famous for its rabbinical schools and synagogues.
• If you are asked where the boulevard Malesherbes leads, a contemporary journalist wrote, ‘answer boldly: to Le West End…One could give it a French name, but that would be vulgar; an English name was far more fashionable.’
• On this street down the hill I feel this play between discretion and opulence, a sort of breathing-in and breathing-out of invisibility and visibility.
• He is two steps ahead of a young woman in a dress of sedate frills carrying a parasol. The sun is out. There is the glare of newly dressed stone. A dog passes by. A workman leans over the bridge. It is like the start of the world: a litany of perfect movements and shadows. Everyone, including the dog, knows what they are doing.
• They also need these languages as they are denominators of class. With languages, you can move from one social situation to another.
• With languages, you are at home anywhere.
• This is where they are blooded in the sheer scale of what will be theirs, taught the catechism of profit from the endless columns in the ledgers.
• But I also begin to feel his pleasure in stuff here: the surprising weight of damask, the chill of the surface of enamels, the patina of bronzes, the heft of the raised thread on the embroideries.
• Here the works of the Renaissance Italy of merchants and bankers were celebrated: remember that great patronage comes through the astute use of money and is not hereditary.
• What was the etiquette of meeting your friend on the way up the stairs to your brother-in-law’s apartment? These lovers might have needed the back rooms of dealers just to get away from all this smothering, knowing amiability.
• embroidered satins, playthings, simply arrived at a merchant’s shop and immediately left for artists’ studios or writers’ studies…They entered the hands of…Carolus Duran, Manet, James Tissot, Fantin-Latour, Degas, Monet, the writers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Philippe Burty, Zola…the travellers Cernuschi, Duret, Emile Guimet…The movement was established, the amateurs followed.
• For with Japanese art there was an exhilarating lack of connoisseurship, none of the enmeshed knowledge of art historians to confound your immediate responses, your intuitions.
• For three whole weeks, before I find an even earlier mention, I think this is the first ever use of the term in print, and am filled with excitement that my netsuke and japonisme are linked so beautifully,
• When you see and hold these lacquers – or netsuke or bronzes – you are immediately conscious of this work: they embody all the travail, and yet they are miraculously free.