Books: "Custodians of Wonder" By Eliot Stein

 

Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive

By Eliot Stein

St. Martin's Press; hardcover, 336 pages; $29.00

Eliot Stein is a journalist and editor at BBC Travel who currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and young son. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Wired, The Guardian, The Washington Post, National Geographic, and The Independent. 

The new book, Custodians of Wonder, is an evolution of a column he created for the BBC called Custom Made, in which he profiles people who uphold ancient traditions throughout the world. He pauses to look back and consider how these rites have shaped us and the places from which we come. 

"Chances are you have never heard of a single person in these pages or the practices they're maintaining," Stein writes of the 10 people he profiles. "These are unsung, unheralded, and relatively unknown people living simple lives. Yet, the extraordinary things that they do reveal a profound and little-known truth about a place's unique identity... It's about why these unlikely things you likely never knew existed matter, why these individuals continue to carry on, and what it means when the unique traditions and customs that make us who we are fade away. Above all, it's a celebration of human ingenuity, imagination, and perseverance, and a love letter to the people, places, and practices that make the world such a wondrous place."

In Japan, Stein encounters a man who is saving the secret ingredient in the country's 700-year-old original soy sauce recipe. When Stein went to Italy, he learned how to make the world's rarest pasta from one of the women alive who knows how to make it. 

In India, Stein discovered a family rumored to make a mysterious metal mirror believed to unveil your truest self. He shadows Scandinavia's last night watchman, and climbs through Peru's southern Highlands, encountering the last Inca bridge master who rebuilds a grass-woven bridge every year from the fabled Inca Road System.

There is also a story about a British beekeeper who maintains a touching custom of "telling the bees" important news of the day. Stein then makes his way through a German forest to find the official mailman of the only tree in the world with its own address - to which numerous people from around the world have written in the hope they can find love. 

Stein writes of the necessity of his book at this moment, "If the coronavirus pandemic revealed anything, it's how connected we all are; how the actions of one person echo across a community; and how the elderly, the working class, and those without safety nets are the most vulnerable in a crisis. Unsurprisingly, these truths apply to most subjects and stories in this book...

"Similarly, while the pandemic heightened our collective sense of global interconnectedness, it also awakened us to the irreversible effects of globalization. When localism gives way to internationalism, we often lose the distinct vestiges that make our world so wonderfully diverse - and this global homogenization is happening before our eyes. Nine languages disappear every year. By 2080, that annual rate is expected to jump to 16, and if we don't do anything to halt this linguistic loss, more than half of the world's languages will be extinct in the next 100 years. By 2030, 8.5 percent of the global manufacturing workforce could be replaced by robots. Nearly 3,000 villages in Spain are at risk of becoming ghost towns, 2,500 in Italy are perilously depopulated; and 896 towns and villages across Japan are estimated to disappear by 2040 as better-paying jobs lure young people to cities - a phenomenon the country's former minister for internal affairs Hiroya Masuda described as 'local extinction.'

"None of this bodes well for those who travel to be stirred by the unfamiliar and enthralled by the boundless depths of how the natural world affects human expression. Nor does it for the endangered artisans and final custodians preserving a knowledge that would otherwise fade away. In many ways, these guardians are the closest things we have to humanity's wise men and women. And while culture is an ever-evolving force, it isn't far-fetched to say that what's at risk of being lost with their disappearance is nothing less than the world's local, whimsical soul."