Love notes into an old oak tree

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About the world’s fading traditions & why they matter

We often hear of the innovators, the pioneers, people who move things forward. But there’s barely a whisper about those who preserve a valuable tradition. Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive by Eliot Stein explores “the gorgeous, irrational gentle things humans do” that make our world fascinating. We only miss them when they’re gone. 

For instance, take Burano-made lace, described as “embroidered air”. For 300 years, this needlework was one of the most prized techniques of the Western world. It was the boast of royalty, height of fashion, stuff of international smuggling. It was the life’s work of all the anonymous women who made the Italian island famous. 

The book explores ten of these cultural marvels on the brink of extinction. It meets ageing craftspersons, lingers over fading customs. 

Take the “living libraries” of West Africa, griots or djelis who have served as the bards and historians of their communities for 800 years. Disney’s Lion King is inspired by the prince Sundiata, a near-mythical figure who issued one of the world’s first human rights charters, and governed his empire as a multiethnic federation. Little is known about him except through the oral history of the djelis. 

The book explores dying professions – the last night watchman in a lighthouse carrying on his medieval occupation in a Swedish town, the last bridge-master of wondrous woven suspension bridges in the Peruvian Andes. This is not just work, but a worldview, a belief that the natural world is filled with spirits to be revered. 

The book tracks down Sardinia’s rare pasta, su filindeu or “threads of God”, handed from mother to daughter over 300 years, within a single family. It is intricately connected to its context; taken to Canada or Greece, it would just be pulled pasta, like “serving communion wafers at a ball game”.

In Kerala, the Aranmula kannadi, a mysterious metal-alloy mirror, is believed to reflect your truest self. It’s believed that only 26 people alive know the oval handheld mirror’s exact proportions. Glass mirrors always have a slight distortion. The Aranmula craft carried on the ancient tradition of metal mirrors, and stumbled on the perfect ratio, isolating the delta almost perfectly. But this tradition wouldn’t exist without one particular craftsman who sustained it, entirely without considerations of ego, taught it freely, never gaining from its popularity.  

The book explores Taiwan and Cuba through stories of the painters of film posters and cigar-makers. It explores the traditions of British beekeepers, how they whisper to the hive when a beekeeper dies, ceremonially inviting them to grieve. In Japan, it tracks one man’s quest to keep soy sauce aged and fermented through mould and bacteria, rather than modern methods of big companies that turned it into a global seasoning. 

In a German forest, it finds the most romantic job in Europe – delivering love notes into the knothole of an old oak tree. Germany, for all its modern industry, has a forest soul, the custom reminds us – waldeinsamkeit is the untranslatable German word for woodland solitude.

Taken together, these are stories of a local, whimsical world. We live with global homogenisation and local disappearance; nine languages die in one year. The book is a reminder of human ingenuity, imagination and perseverance, of what’s at stake when our unique traditions fade away.

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