The Things That Matter

July 19, 2025

In the summer of 2014, friends from England and their two children visited in Bordeaux while I worked on my book. One day, we took a train to Biarritz and walked around the town in the blazing heat. Jonathan noticed a tea shop down a side street. We signaled to his wife Ann and their two young daughters that we’d catch up with them after a look inside. We both noticed right away a Japanese cast iron teapot, sitting on its own iron trivet among a cluster of other iron teapots. Jonathan bent down to peer closely at it from eye level. He picked it up to feel its weight, replaced it, and bent down again to view its profile. “What a beauty,” he said softly. Fortunately for me, another pot standing next to it — same maker, same shape but tinted a burnished gold — drew his eye away from the solid black one, which I picked up.

Good lord, I thought, could it weigh as much 3 pounds?1 I cupped my hands around the teapot’s body. Viewed from the side, it had the shape of a small American football. From above, it formed a perfect circle interrupted by the spout. Looked at from an oblique angle, it looked like a puffed tortilla on a hot comal. The handle was gracefully arced over the lid. Inside was a lining of dark, translucent porcelain enamel. Compared to those surrounding it, this teapot was elegant; the others were more rotund and angular. The blackness of the iron was deep and absolute. I ran my fingers ran over the knobby surface. To me. it was the platonic ideal of a Japanese cast iron teapot. Or, at any rate, it was my platonic idea of a Japanese teapot. I put it back on the counter and stood back to look at it.

Actually, as I discovered much later, it’s not a teapot. No Japanese iron pot is. As a few huffy people insisted in a Reddit thread on “Japanese cast iron teapots,” these vessels are kettles, tetsubin in Japanese. They are traditionally placed over a flame to heat water, but in the West tea drinkers pour boiling water from another kettle into the tetsubin to steep tea leaves. Most of those sold in the US and Europe, like the one I admired, have a wire-mesh strainer insert to hold the loose-leaf tea.

I paid €110 for my platonic ideal, a price that in 2014 felt as special as the pot. Today, similar pots can cost twice that amount. I’m pretty sure the company that made my pot is Iwachu. You can see a selection of their tetsubin here. For a little history, look here. Although some of the pot-belly tetsubin are lovely, I have yet to find one I would prefer to mine. Ever since I bought it, whenever I see iron pots in a tea shop, I pick up the ones that appeal to me and make invidious comparisons. Rarely have I found one as perfectly proportioned or as heavy as mine.

As I lifted my teapot out of the box I put it in a year ago, I thought about the functions of favored possessions. They are among our most intimate instruments. The habitual use of valued objects in our everyday life reassures us that, no matter what is going on around us, things — literally — are as they should be. We take the measure of our emotional well-being in the act of using them, as if taking a sounding to measure the depth of a pool of water. No matter where I am, every morning I make myself tea. I transfer the tea to a thermos, and then drink it while I solve crossword puzzles, another daily practice. These rituals involving objects can be private, shared, or collective performances, whether it’s an ornate silver chalice in the service of a Catholic mass or a glazed ceramic cup filled during a Zen Buddhist tea ceremony. But you needn’t be religious to use an object in a way that centers you for a few moments each day.2 I know someone who says she thinks of her late mother every time she uses a particular pan she claimed from her mother’s belongings.

Many of us now in the last quarter of our lives own too much stuff. I certainly did until last year. I cheerfully divested myself of my household possessions when I was looking forward to starting a new life in France. When that didn’t pan out as I planned, I had no regrets. I remembered something the journalist Kyle Chayka wrote about the migration of the minimalist aesthetic from Japan to Western culture.

The Buddhism at the root of this aesthetic was about accepting the fact that life is ephemeral, that every material thing will inevitably drift away and all that remains is whatever joy we can take in the midst in this process of emptying.3

So, when I closed up my home earlier this year, I put my teapot in the small pile of things I couldn’t justify buying replacements for or just couldn’t bear parting with, like my cast-iron pans, my rice strainer, the Aura Frame displaying my history in photos, and my Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary (purchased in 1987). And I felt joy seeing them again when I returned from my travels. Now, I am refurnishing my home with fewer, cheaper, but nonetheless inviting furniture. As it was when I first moved in here in 2015, sharing meals at a round table set for 5 or 6 guests is my priority. My home has to be sufficiently comfortable and convenient to attract a renter for part of next year. The joy I’m feeling these days derives from a replenishing, but I’m mindful of another emptying down the road.

1 In fact, it turns out to weigh 4.2 lbs.

2 A topic, I gather, the food writer Bee Wilson explores in her new book, The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects (2025), which as of this posting has not yet been released in the US.

3 Kyle Chayka, The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism (2020), p. 174.