Chapter 4, ‘Ethics and the Everyday’, demonstrates how letter-writing creates a porous space where questions in ethics, ethnography, and everyday living intersect with cultures of friendship, citizenship, and reciprocity in ways that anticipate our late modern fascination with the experiential. Intersubjective sense-making, solidarity, hospitality, and the gift are approached through perspectives drawn from the thought of Jacques Derrida, and from care studies, material culture studies, and eudaimonics. The chapter begins with an investigation of the epistolary encounter with both ordinary and exceptional things, asking how particular objects – the proximate and palpable – inscribe the epistolary imaginary and create a sense of material thickness in letter-writing. Curiosity, attentiveness, and the investment of care in things reveal a sustained commitment to the world of objects, repositories of ethical, eudaimonic, and heuristic value. This ethical commitment informs letter-writing around cultures of gifting. If the sharing of benefits is a major conduit of friendship, modes of calibration temper and regulate relations of power and influence in letter-writing.