What Collectors Fear

Photo by Takemaru Hirai on Unsplash

To all intents and purposes, I'm a collector. I collect quotes in various places, fragments of beautiful sentences, random thoughts and ideas. I collect books I want to read and TV shows and movies I want to watch. I have a whole section on my website called Collections (you're in it right now).

A while ago, I was reading Empireland (a rough read but such an important book), and I noted that the British Empire is, among other things, distinct for its obsession with collecting things. From museums and individuals holding artefacts or artworks to cataloguing all species of birds, there's something at once beautiful and dark about the act of collecting. There's something beautiful in the desire to appreciate the beauty of something or to come back to it again and again. But collecting can have a dark side if it removes the objects we collect from the world, hoarding them for our own private use.

My kind of collection doesn't deplete, necessarily. No one loses access to a quote because I copied it into my database. But the impulse to hold on to things comes from the same place: anxiety. If I have a list of books to read, a database of quotes and ideas, then I have an illusion of control over what I can think about. I think it's ultimately about control, which, as Oliver Burkeman explains beautifully, is really about the fear of death. If we can control our environment, we can live under the illusion that we control our fate.

But another way to look at it is that my kind of collection is more composting than hoarding. I take in people's ideas and art and let them sit, hoping that what grows from them will be worth passing on. And if I'm really lucky, it will one day feed someone else's creativity.