The World In A Grain Of Sand: How handrails, wafers and other trivial things explain everything
This is ‘book’ 16 in the series The Impossible Books of Keith Kahn-Harris. The cover was created by Gus Condeixa. For more on this series, read the introduction here.
What sort of book is it?
Either a single book that draws out the significance of trivial details; or a series of short books that focus on a single trivial detail.
How likely is it that I will write the book?
I may write some essays based on this at some point. I’d certainly love to be editor in chief of a series of books in this area.
Am I happy for anyone else to write the book?
Not these examples, but I guess there is open season on the wider concept.
Synopsis
This idea follows on from and develops further my last Impossible Book, The Superfluous Percussionist, which is intended to be the first in a series of shortish books that reveal the hidden details of popular music history. It also echoes the conceit in an earlier Impossible Book, Glimpsed, that detailed investigation of apparently fleeting encounters can open up interesting and even profound stories.
The basic assumption behind The World In A Grain Of Sand is that, as William Blake puts it in the poem from which the title is taken, is that one can ‘hold infinity in the palm of your hand’ by appreciating how the seemingly insignificant is intrinsically connected into everything else in the universe. We don’t live in a world of disconnected things, but within a complex system in which the small and the large are bound together. Or to put it more bluntly: you don’t have to look at the big picture itself if you want to see the big picture.
The World In A Grain Of Sand is hardly unique in taking delight in delving into the trivial. There are plenty of wonderful books that revel in the joy of unearthing the histories behind seemingly insignificant things. I recently enjoyed James Ward’s Adventures In Stationery, which did exactly this. Ward is the organizer of the Boring Conference (where I spoke in 2015), an annual celebration of gas holders, elevators, roundabouts and the like.
However my approach to trivial, mundane things doesn’t stop at just celebrating them and revelling in the details — lovely though that is. As a died-in-the-wool sociologist, I’m incapable of not moving from the particular to the general, from the micro to the macro. I want to find in untold trivial stories the movement of tectonic plates, the trends that shape our world. In fact, I want to test the idea that zooming in on some tiny detail might actually be more effective way in to understanding the way the world moves.
So here are some suitably trivial starting points that world work as chapters in a larger book or as short books on their own:
- When did handrails and bannisters becoming ubiquitous?
Whenever I visit a castle or old building, I’m always struck that handrails are almost always recent additions grafted on to the original structure. Puffing my way up a medieval spiral staircase, or gingerly manoeuvring down one, the handrail is a life-saver — why weren’t they ftted in the first place? Was this because the technology didn’t exist (apparently not according to this Wikipedia article)? My hunch is that the absence of handrails reveals something about changing ideas and evaluations of risk: it was, I hypothesise, only in modernity that the risks of falling was judged significant. Why?
- Why are wafers so popular in the Middle East?
Go into any grocery catering to the Middle Eastern market in a European city, or in any grocery in Egypt, Israel or neighbouring countries and you see them: a vast range of sweet wafers. Why wafers? Did a particular company spot a market and flood it? Has it to do with the heat (chocolate melts — although it also melts in wafer-free societies too)? Or is there a taste substratum that runs through Middle Eastern societies in ways that have yet to be fully recognized?
- Shaving in prison
Prisons for men have a problem: the last thing you want to do in prison is to give inmates sharp objects, but if you don’t give them, how do prisoners shave? The problem of shaving in prison seems to highlight issues of what sorts of freedoms should be granted to the confined. Have prisoners always been allowed to shave? When have they not? When have they been given razors themselves and when have they been shaved centrally? And does allowing prisoners to shave despite the difficulties it causes for jailors — when so many other, much more innocuous activities are denied them — suggest that shaving is seen as a foundational recognition of a common humanity?
Other ideas for similarly profound trivialities would be most welcome!
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this Impossible Book, why not browse through the rest of the series here?
Also, please recommend and share it on Medium or elsewhere. I would love to read your comments too.
Many thanks!
Finally, here’s an alternative cover:
