THE CULT OBJECT

The Telephone

Once, when the telephone rang, you answered it. Now we are reachable all the time, and somehow speak less than ever.

There was once a telephone in the hallway. It sat on a small table, perhaps beside a bowl of keys or beneath a mirror, attached to the house by a cord. When it rang, everybody heard it. Nobody knew who was calling. Somebody had to answer.

There was something wonderfully inconvenient about it. A telephone call demanded your attention in a way that very little does now. You could not quietly read the first line and decide whether you felt like replying. There were no typing bubbles or read receipts, and no opportunity to spend ten minutes composing the perfect response. You picked up the receiver and said hello, and from that moment you were in the conversation.

THE OBJECT

The telephone was designed around conversation. There was the weight of the receiver in the hand, the circular movement of a rotary dial, the satisfying return of each number and the cord that inevitably twisted itself into impossible knots. Even its limitations created a peculiar kind of intimacy. You could only move as far as the cable allowed. A private conversation might mean sitting on the stairs or stretching the cord beneath a closed door while somebody shouted from another room that they needed to use the phone.

Numbers were remembered rather than stored. Friends called the house rather than the person. Parents answered. Siblings hovered nearby and occasionally listened in. To telephone someone was, in a small way, to enter their home. You heard the television playing in another room, a dog barking, somebody putting the kettle on. The telephone connected two places as much as it connected two people.

WHEN THE PHONE STOPPED BEING A TELEPHONE

The object in our pocket still carries the name, but calling someone may now be one of its least significant functions. It is our camera, newspaper, television, map, diary, bank, shop, workplace and entertainment. It wakes us in the morning and is often the last thing we look at before sleeping. We have gained extraordinary convenience, but we have also created the possibility of never being entirely absent.

The old telephone could ring unanswered in an empty house. The modern one follows us into restaurants, bedrooms, holidays, waiting rooms and walks through the countryside. Work can find us at dinner. The news can find us on holiday. Everyone we have ever known can, theoretically, reach us at any moment. There are increasingly few places in which we are truly unavailable.

Perhaps that is why the landline has begun to look strangely beautiful again. Its appeal is not simply nostalgia, nor is it because old technology photographs particularly well. It represents something that has become increasingly rare: communication with boundaries. When you left the house, you left the telephone behind.

CALL ME

There was another quality to the telephone that is harder to photograph. Conversation wandered. A call made for one reason could last an hour. Silences were allowed to exist. Stories became unnecessarily long. Somebody remembered something halfway through and the conversation disappeared in another direction entirely.

Nothing was being documented and nobody was performing for an audience. It was simply two people speaking because they wanted to speak to one another. There was no expectation that the conversation should be interesting enough to share, useful enough to save or concise enough to fit inside a message.

We communicate constantly now. We send photographs, messages, memes, voice notes and little fragments of our days from morning until night. Yet it is possible to spend an entire day communicating without really having a conversation at all. Perhaps that is why hearing someone's voice can suddenly feel unusually intimate.

THE RETURN

We do not need to abandon our smartphones or install rotary telephones in our hallways. Nostalgia becomes less interesting when it simply insists that everything was better before. It wasn't. The old telephone was inconvenient, restrictive and occasionally infuriating. That was partly the point.

There is, however, something worth borrowing from it. Call your mother without arranging it first. Telephone the friend you have been sending photographs to for six months. Allow a conversation to go nowhere. Leave your mobile in another room while you eat dinner. Let yourself occasionally become unreachable.

The old telephone understood something we may have forgotten. To give one person our attention, we once had to withdraw it from everything else.

THE CULT OBJECT

A recurring Cutler series on the objects we kept, coveted and gave meaning to, and what they reveal about the way we live.