The Things That Make Us

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

— Anaïs Nin

Look around you. How much of what you own actually means anything?

2026 is the easiest time in history to acquire almost anything. And yet the things we reach for tend to be the things that require the least of us. Convenient. Frictionless. Things that will do.

But objects that carry real and true meaning behave differently. They stop being possessions and start being companions. You look at them the way you look at old photographs, not at the thing itself, but at everything behind it. You remember the moment, not just the click, you remember the way the wind smelled, you remember the rustling of the leaves, you remember the argument you had just before the camera went off. It’s extraordinary. Photographs, like the things that mean the most to us, carry so much more than just the moment or the purpose of the object.

Which, in turn, reminds me of a story I have always admired. In the early part of the 1900s, a man named John Montagu, the second Baron Montagu of Beaulieu, commissioned sculptor Charles Robinson Sykes to create a personal mascot for his Rolls-Royce. What Sykes produced was a figure of a woman, a finger pressed to her lips, titled with some private amusement, “The Whisper”. She is believed to have been modeled after Eleanor Velasco Thornton, Baron Montagu’s secretary, confidante, and perhaps most importantly, lover. A secret carried in silver, catching the light at speed, visible to everyone and understood by no one. One imagines he found that rather satisfying.

Soon, Rolls-Royce themselves saw what Sykes had made and asked him to do it again, this time for everyone. In 1911 he returned to Eleanor once more. The Spirit of Ecstasy was born. She has graced every Rolls-Royce since. Millions have seen her. Almost no one knows whose face she wears, or what she once meant to one man in one car on a private road somewhere in England.

As fate would have it, Eleanor would die in 1915 when the ship that was taking her and Baron Montagu to India was torpedoed by a German U-boat. Montagu would survive, but their story ended in tragedy. However it ended, the meaning behind one of the most iconic motoring sculptures ever survived.

Over a century later, we know her name only because a few people cared enough to go looking. To explore and tell her story. It could so easily have gone the other way. For every Eleanor and Montagu and their secret of speed, there are a thousand stories that left no trace at all. A thousand tragedies forgotten amidst the elusive passage of time.

Objects like the Spirit of Ecstasy are not entirely rare. Humans have a curious habit of attaching sentiments to inanimate objects. The red-numeral Cartier Tank Normale does something similar, and stranger. It is believed that only ten were ever made. Commissioned privately. We don’t know by whom, or why the red numerals, or what the occasion was. The story is simply gone.

And yet the watch remains. Which is the point.

The things we choose will one day outlast us and the reasons we chose them.

So choose carefully. Choose something you’ll look at the way Baron Montagu looked at The Whisper. After all, dings and scratches tell a far better story than polished and untouched.