Question Your Tea Spoons

This is a lovely passage from Georges Perec that Nicholas Nova quoted on his blog, Pasta & Vinegar:

"What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Why? Where? When? Why?

Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare.

Make an inventory of you pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out.

Question your tea spoons.

What is there under your wallpaper?

How many movements does it take to dial a phone number?

Why don’t you find cigarettes in grocery stores? Why not?

It matters little to me that these questions should be fragmentary, barely indicative of a method, at most of a project. It matters a lot to me that they should seem trivial and futile: that’s exactly what makes them just as essential, if not more so, as all the other questions by which we’ve tried in vain to lay hold on our truth."

(Georges Perec, The Infra-Ordinary, 1973, translated by John Sturrock)

Link: Pasta&Vinegar

Some context for the quote: This is from the introductory section of The Infra-Ordinary, a set of essays in which Perec records observations of mundane things.  One essay is called "Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Food-stuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four."  You can find this in the 1998 essay collection Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.