The Sun In A Coffee Spoon

History is a magical mirror. Who peers into it sees his own image in the shape of events and developments. It is never stilled. … The meaning of history arises in the uncovering of relationships. … The historian deals with a perishable material, men… . His role is to put in order in its historical setting what we experience piecemeal from day to day, so that in place of sporadic experience, the continuity of events becomes visible. … History, regarded as insight into the moving process of life, draws closer to biological phenomena. We shall speak little, here, of general lines and great events, and then only when necessary to connect occurrences with the bedrock in which they are rooted.

We shall inquire in the first line into the tools that have molded our present-day living. We would know how this mode of life came about, and something of the process of its growth.

We shall deal here with humble things, things not usually granted earnest consideration, or at least not valued for their historical import. But no more in history than in painting is it the impressiveness of the subject that matters. The sun is mirrored even in a coffee spoon.

In their aggregate, the humble objects of which we shall speak have shaken our mode of living to its very roots. Modest things of daily life, they accumulate into force acting upon whoever moves within the orbit of our civilization.

The slow shaping of daily life is of equal importance to the explosions of history; for, in the anonymous life, the particles accumulate into an explosive force.