Ode to common things

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda loved "things." His three homes are filled with his treasures--colored glass, figureheads from old ships, masks from around the world--and he composed odes to birds, to salt, to socks. In "Ode to Common Things," he writes, "many things conspired to tell me the whole story. Not only did they touch me, or my hand touched them: they were so close that they were a part of my being, they were so alive with me that they lived half my life and will die half my death." He believed that everything ever made bore "the trace of someone’s fingers on their handle or surface, the trace of a distant hand lost in the depths of forgetfulness." I can...