Articles: RE: Re-Enchantment

Get out of the dogma house.
The title of a recent book, The Re-Enchantment of Art might be broadened to read, The Re-Enchantment of Life. A lot has been written about the Culture Wars (why it is usually put in the plural I do not know) and one divide I can think of puts those mystics who believe in enchantment one one side and those materialists who wish to see it abolished on the other. Sometimes it seems that the latter is winning. Recalling just how enthralling a certain large city was as a kid at Christmas time, we reserved rooms a few years ago at a grand old hotel there during the Christmas period, naively hoping to revel in that blissful mix of shopping, snowy festivity and cosmopolitanism. To our shock, we discovered a city stuck in the gray grips of winter without the leaven of a single colored light or wafting carol.

Dead batteries, sprained ankles.
Think of a year without the grand brooding music of Christmas or sacred recitations of Hanuukkah, the month of December just business as usual. Dead batteries, sprained ankles. None of that elated week or two in which we, as a species, go a little deeper into ourselves, muse a while about the essential splendor and sacredness and comedy of our existence? No spell under which we can, with impunity, crack open that old emotion that is otherwise so démodé—joy?

Keats in 3000 AD?
At Trace we are avid believers in the re-enchantment of life. For paper to thrive in the new order of things, enchantment too must thrive. Like everything else, both must be re-imagined, refined, perhaps re-shaped. For Lynne and myself, great books have always been magical. The discovery of a great book or author is celebrated chez Diamond-Nigh with chocolate cake and champagne. I don’t think a month has gone by since adolescence that I have not re-read at least one of Keats’ great Odes. And writing has been that too. Lynne guards her fine old fountain pens as if they were small grails. Re-imagine re-enchantment!

Enchants perchance.
And this new business, with all its ups and downs and (whew!!!) stupid mis-steps at times, has been a foray towards enchantment, a quest to bring together skills and passions that we have each developed over our lives in different occupations into a new, creative and exhilarating synthesis that re-imagines what paper can become and that, in the process enchants, perchance, the lives of other’s as well. And this time of year seems as good as any to say thanks to all of you, thanks for subscribing to our newsletter, for buying our stuff, and for so generously wishing us well in this venture!