![]() ‘‘There are more things to pick up.’’Įdmund de Waal made his first pot when he was 5. (He inherited it from his grandmother.) So he put the perfect bowl back on the shelf. He told me that part of him wanted to break it with a hammer, but that he couldn’t quite manage to work up the courage. He rotated the bowl in his hands, long fingers probing, searching, weighing. This is why people don’t like porcelain: because it’s precious. The writing and the porcelain are inseparable now they lean on one another like the inside and outside of a pot.Īt the end of our first handling session, after all of those clods and shards, de Waal passed me the only thing in the room that he didn’t seem to like: a perfect 18th-century porcelain bowl from Dresden, painted intricately with fruit and flowers. ‘‘The White Road’’ is a verbal extension of his lifelong work in ceramics. (Hitler was one of history’s many porcelain-obsessed megalomaniacs.) Coming from a more orthodox mind, de Waal’s stories, and his pots, might have turned out to be dull, dry, obscure, conventional and neatly contained. ![]() The tiny netsuke become great repositories of human experience they contain generations of Jewish aspiration, delusion, exile and loss.ĭe Waal’s new book, ‘‘The White Road,’’ is about porcelain - the substance’s unexpectedly dramatic voyage, over the last 1,000 years, from one magic white hill in China, the original source of the clay, to the rest of the clamoring world: Versailles, Dresden, England and even concentration camps in Germany. Through meticulous research, he tried to resurrect all of the many hands that have tumbled them over the centuries. In the book, de Waal traces the history of these intricate little sculptures, which he inherited from his great-uncle Iggie, from 18th-century Japan to 19th-century Paris to Holocaust-era Vienna, where they were hidden in a mattress by the family’s maid to protect them from the Nazis. It was, de Waal said, an odd overlapping of worlds: porcelain that had been cooked too hot, so that its delicate white layers had fused, permanently, with their rough outer molds perfection and failure welded together into something more interesting than either on its own. One of the shards was a big, chunky encrustation that looked like a particularly ugly seashell. ‘‘Part of the DNA of porcelain is getting messed up,’’ he said. He seemed delighted by all the ruination. He handed me shard after shard after shard of ancient porcelain dishes. He handed me a rough lump of Cherokee clay: a clod of petrified dirt, a meatball from outer space. ‘‘It’s collapsed in on itself,’’ he said, ‘‘but look at the fineness of it.’’ He passed me an imperial stem cup, many hundreds of years old, the rim of which seemed to be wilting. He has unusually big hands, too all the objects looked relaxed and at home in them, like young birds in the grasp of an animal handler. He is 51 and very tall, with short slate-gray hair and round glasses that rest on large, protrusive ears: ears that are somehow childish, ears to be grown into. ![]() We were standing in the room where he writes, in his studio in London, and he was pulling these specimens off a shelf near his desk. I was touching not only space but time.ĭe Waal kept handing me objects: perfect things, ruined things, priceless things, worthless things. My fingers felt this as they felt the plate. If all went well, this delicate thing would outlive us all by many more generations. Instead, I just stood there, probing its edges with my finger pads, weighing it in my palms, tracing the precise volume of space that it was displacing in the world. I could have snapped it in half or thrown it on the floor. It was older than printed books, older than every traceable generation of my family. In my fingers, the plate felt both fragile and indestructible. To understand an object, he believes, you have to touch it. De Waal just passed it to me as if it were nothing. He handed me, for instance, a 1,000-year-old Chinese porcelain plate - the kind of object you would expect to see in a climate-controlled glass case in a museum, protected, at great expense, from clumsy, meaty, oily, inexpert hands like mine. Within a few minutes of my meeting Edmund de Waal, he was putting things in my hands.
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