“The Secret Life of Things: The Implicit Abundance of Attention and Memory in the Profoundly Mundane Cases of Two Little Brown Loafers and a Silly Girl’s Cluttered Dormitory”

It was the four walls and the shut door. It was the stack of Plato volumes. It was the desk to write and the Blessed Mother to hold. But it wasn’t just them, in their quiet state of rest, in their active state of decay. It was her and how she knew them and how she loved them. The mundane things called out quietly to her, and their whispers inspired her exploration into the secret life of things. 

In her research, Lauren McGinn, a senior double major in Philosophy and Anthropology with a minor in Writing, pursues her love for phenomenology, the study of things as they are and as they appear, seeking to understand the inner framework of the human consciousness with an emphasis on humanistic experience. In her defense of Heidegger’s critique of categorical knowledge and her subsequent “endorsement of the existential understanding of space in relation to objects of mundanity,” she focuses on how the individual’s experience with an object is inherently linked to that object’s artistic depth and historical presence. She recognizes a unique life and significance within what others would call ordinary and meaningless.

Her research was spurred on by walking through the Hall of Remembrance at the Holocaust Museum, her mind lingering on the small shoes of lost victims. She was struck by the little brown loafers, suggesting a whole other existence of a boy she would never know, holding a tragic history that disappeared with its knower. Perhaps one would be able to see something of this lost existence if they deeply considered the mundane object before them, if they only acknowledged that these were more than just a pair of shoes. Lauren argues that phenomenology allows for the more complete representation of individuals, for it allows us to consider the deeply personal experience of this little boy who was rendered nameless. She asserts that categories fail when it comes to engaging in empathy, which requires people to recognize depth in everyday stuff to access the human consciousness ingrained in its historical existence.

Lauren’s focus on mundane objects purposefully differs from the more common focus on acclaimed art and architecture. People will reserve their engagement with aesthetic depth and for art but neglect to do the same for everyday things. She seeks for people to understand that while art has this phenomenological depth and existential history, so too do mundane things. Everything is an aesthetic object. Some items, like skeletons and Crucifixes, call out loudly and explicitly. But others—shoes left on the steps of a house or a mother’s jewelry—call out quietly, whispering, “Look a little deeper,” and “I have an existential history, I have an existential presence.” 

Lauren explains that rootedness comes from understanding those things that whisper to us. She is curious how she can use objects to root herself in time and space and attune herself with these things that can make us feel more connected to the world. 

The style of her research is thoroughly marked by her creativity and her desire to demonstrate the phenomenological method as she experienced it, using a focus on one thing in her consciousness, such as the bits and bobs in her room, to reach truth. She wanted to use her first hand experience to discuss mundane things because she cannot talk on behalf of others; she can only talk on behalf of herself, which is why she fills her research with anecdotes, a kind of meditative exercise that allows her to feel rooted in her existential being while writing. She seeks to write about these mundane objects, talk about them, understand them, bring them to salvation, and root herself within them. She urges others to do the same, to have the patience to connect with things mindfully.

Read Lauren's piece, "the Secret Life of Things", in the upcoming issue of Inventio Volume 10!