Simo / What It Replaced

The objects that quietly left the hallway table.

A short inventory of things that stopped being bought, and were barely mourned.

Consider a hallway of a few decades ago. A telephone on a small table, tethered to the wall. Beside it a pad and a pencil, and under that a directory thick enough to prop a door. On the wall a calendar with a picture of a coastline, and near the door a street directory for the car. In a drawer, a torch, a spare roll of film, a stack of prints, a diary, a chequebook, a train timetable, a pile of maps folded wrongly, and a small book of numbers in three different handwritings. Nearly every item on that table now lives inside one rectangle.

What is striking is how little resistance any of it put up. Objects that seemed permanent went without a fight, because none of them were loved for themselves. People never cared about street directories. They cared about arriving. The directory was the price of arriving, and when a cheaper way to arrive appeared, the object was abandoned within a few years by nearly everybody, including the people who spoke fondly of it afterwards. Sentiment about tools tends to appear only once the tools are safely out of daily service and can be admired without being used.

A few survivors are instructive. The paper wall calendar persists in kitchens because it is shared: it can be read by a household at a glance, which a personal device cannot do. Printed photographs persist because a frame does something a screen does not, which is to hold one image still for years. The pattern is clear enough. What survived was not what was best at the task, but what was good at being visible to more than one person at once. The rectangle is excellent at everything except being looked at by a family together.