The more abstract, placeless and bodiless our existences, the more we come to live beside ourselves, and encounter the world and each other at a distance and through various kinds of remote control, the odder and lovelier things can become, and the greater the importance in our lives can be of objects that we can lay hands on, manipulate, transform and do things with. Human beings are such incorrigible fidgets, such manipulators of objects, of things we can touch and handle, or think of touching and handling, that it is scarcely possible for us to think, dream and imagine without things exerting their shaping force upon us. We think with shapes and weights and scales and textures. The effort to prolong this way of thinking through things is what constitutes the group of writings assembled here under the title of Rough Magic . The essence of a magical object is that it is more than an object.
All magical objects surpass themselves.
There is no more magical object than a ball. The first magical objects are probably the blankets, rattles and teddies that young children use for comfort and security, and to ease the growth of the knowledge that the world is full of things that are not them. Children know that their blankets, rattles and teddy-bears are not them, but are nevertheless theirs. These objects have the powers to arouse, absorb, stabilise, seduce, disturb, soothe, succour and drug. Some of the magical objects about which I talk are ancient, some belong to the world of contemporary technology.