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There is a specific category of object that does not depreciate. Most things that carry meaning — photographs, handwritten letters, clothing, the physical objects that accumulate in a household over a life — degrade. Paper yellows and grows brittle. Photographs fade. Fabric frays and eventually disintegrates. The objects most associated with sentiment are also, as physical matter, among the most fragile.

Fine jewelry made in precious metals and properly set hard gemstones is not in this category. The gold is the same gold. The platinum is the same platinum. The alexandrite, set in its bezel, is the same alexandrite. The object the grandmother purchased is the object the granddaughter will hold. There is no equivalent statement that can be made about a photograph, a letter, or a piece of clothing.

Memory, furthermore, is lossy across generations. Stories get shorter with each telling — details drop, context compresses, eventually what remains is a name and a feeling and perhaps one specific image. The family that remembers in full detail the circumstances of a grandparent's life has maintained something rare. Most families have not. What they have instead are objects, which do not forget.

A signet ring bearing a specific heraldic symbol, made to specification in platinum with a hand-carved intaglio face, will be worn in fifty years by someone who knows its owner only from other people's descriptions. That person will be able to read the symbol on the face, know what it meant, understand the choice. The symbol does not forget any more than the platinum does.

The question for anyone commissioning a piece at this level is therefore not simply: do I love it? The question is: what should this object still be in seventy years? What does it need to say to someone who will have known me only from other people's accounts? The material answers the durability question automatically. The design — the symbols chosen, the form selected, the meaning encoded — answers the other one.

The difference between a piece purchased and a piece commissioned is the difference between acquiring an object and writing a sentence. The commission says: someone thought carefully about who she was, about what she wanted to persist, and made something accordingly. The object carries that thought forward into time, past the conditions that produced it, into hands that have not yet formed.

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