About
everydaymarvels.blog was inspired by a post from Ted Gioia in his The Honest Broker newsletter: The Banishment of Beauty from Everyday Life. It struck a chord with me, and it simply made me happy to see some of the examples he showed. I wanted the post to keep going longer and longer so I could see more of his examples of beautiful things. But of course, it wasn’t the point of his post to be a showcase or gallery of such stuff.
It made me want to build one, though. Things that I would call everyday marvels, the name of this blog.
It’s difficult to draw a boundary around what I will post here and what not. The best I can distill it down to is this: Things that are made to be beautiful just for the sake of it, besides their original function. Beauty is subjective, of course, but maybe it’s also about the intent and care that is behind it.
This definition excludes “art” in their common forms, like paintings or sculptures or so on, since they don’t really have any other function. Train tickets in Ted’s post are a good example, and ditto for the Art Deco radios. They don’t have to be beautiful to fulfill their primary function, yet here they are.
To be honest, part of the fun for me with this effort is to discover what other categories of things we can find to post here. Some are obvious (tickets, furniture, architecture, stamps…) but how many of us would think about sewer covers when we talk about things that can be beautiful? I hope to have a good balance between the obvious and the uncommon here.
If you think about anything that should be featured here, please get in touch with me here