Despite our culture’s squeamishness, there is no escape from touch, and there is no escape from time, and these two facts are intimately related. All of the hands that exist today, all of the objects they will ever touch, will someday, not long from now, be gone. All we can do, in the meantime, is to be fully present in the world we have — to roll it, insistently, in our fingers — and, in doing so, to light up as many of the nodes along the continuum of time that we can: the absent uncles and workmen and lovers and thieves, the people who held the world before any of us were here to hold it, and, if we’re lucky, the people who will hold it when we are finally gone. Although de Waal often writes about objects, what he is really writing about is the power of presence, of intimacy. As he puts it at the end of ‘‘The White Road’’: ‘‘It is this consolation, someone walking part of the way by your side, that means almost everything. Everything.’’

On my second afternoon at the studio, the 58 pots de Waal made the day before had dried to their optimal texture — potters call it ‘‘leather hard,’’ or ‘‘cheese hard.’’ And so de Waal started cutting them. He slapped them back on the wheel and, as they spun, trimmed off excess clay with a set of tools that reminded me of dental equipment. He bent himself in half again, and his head bobbed slightly in rhythm with the spinning wheel, and ribbons of wet clay spun off the pots. Occasionally he would pick up a little sponge and dab, mysteriously, at the rim. When all the excess clay had been trimmed, de Waal pulled the pot off the wheel and, with a knife, cut his characteristic little scallops out of the base. This is one of his signatures, these dents and caves. De Waal cut quickly, intuitively, like someone paring an apple. He was not precious about it, not terribly serious, just matter-of-factly doing what his hands told him was the right thing for each pot. He could have been whittling sticks by a lake.

I kept asking questions about how he decided what and where to cut. Why that spot and not this one? Why deep and not shallow? He said he was just trying to bring the outside of the pot into the proper relationship to its inside. O.K., yes, sure, I said. But why did you make that particular cut? And why did you make that one?

After a while, de Waal responded by handing me one of the pots — fresh, cheese-dry, ready to cut. He handed me the knife. ‘‘Cut it,’’ he said. This seemed sacrilegious, but he insisted. So I did. I tried to emulate his cutting: to whittle out small slivers that added texture without ruining everything. The first pot I tried turned out O.K. De Waal said that my largest cut had a nice ‘‘authority’’ to it.

The second pot, however, I completely destroyed. I carved out so many hunks of wet porcelain that there was almost nothing left — a little nub, all angles. Ruination. De Waal seemed to agree. But he also seemed equally satisfied with both pots, the success and the failure. He set them both on the board to dry.