“Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are all kinds of beauty in an antique shop.
There is the beauty of the petite, faded gown on the mannequin, too small it seems for anyone, beyond wearing, yet elegant for all time.
There is the beauty in the creaking shelf of old books with yellowing pages, sturdily bound.
There is the beauty in the careful, delicate design of someone else’s needlework.
There is the beauty of florals and small scenes on china that nonetheless doesn’t quite belong on your own shelf.
There is the beauty of the typewriter whose keys still click and tap.
And then there are the unconventionally beautiful things. The things that we touch with our fingers and smile at and do not buy unless we remember that our great-grandmother had one exactly like it- or find imaginative joy in it. The strange figurines and curious tableware.
Antique shops are filled with things old to ancient- but Emerson writes that we love them for something more. Maybe so, because what is something old without something human? What is the strangely elegant dress without a young woman who wore it, or needlework without someone who made it? Even museums display ancient items that interest archaeologists, historians, and the curious wanderer because of the people who once possessed them.
I went to an antique shop and to a mall in the same weekend and felt the contrast- not to say one was better than the other. I didn't go to the antique shop to get new shoes any more than I went to the mall to get century-old postcards. But if the mall was everything current, everything present, the antique shop reminded me of past the present cannot do without.
I bought a postcard sent in 1908 to let a friend know he had arrived safely home. It was a mundane message- how did it happen to find its way to an antique shop in Angelica, New York? How could the writer have imagined a 21st century girl buying it? Why would I buy it? Because the postcard was beautiful (a design of pansies) and human. The handwriting was spidery and almost impossible, and the words were simple and unpretentious. It mattered that the writer had arrived home safely as much as it matters that one of my good friends arrives home safely. And I can hardly begin to imagine the ripple effects through history if the writer hadn't arrived home safely.
Antique shops are filled with fragments of human lives, their stories, and their oddities. They are filled with things that are in one way utterly unnecessary (the strange figurines and curious tableware) and in another way, desperately necessary. They tell the story of the past to our present, and in the stories and oddities, keep human history- human. And so the items of the antique shop become beautiful, and the time spent wandering, perusing, is well spent.
