Cat on the Shrink's Couch

Interesting column by the always-excellent Matt Cheney at Strange Horizons. I thought it pegged the rather book-shaped hole in my head:

We collect to fill holes. I have surrounded myself with books partly for pragmatic reasons—I do read them, or at least a lot of them—but also because acquiring books allows me to give concrete form to certain aspects of my personality. When the days grow solitary, I don't need to feel lonely, because I can read the words of thousands of people. When the world becomes bewildering and life slips into shades of meaninglessness, I can rescue myself with other worlds and ideas. When I grow tired of my own words, there are always millions of somebody else's waiting within arm's reach.

Of course, collecting is seldom a solitary act, and collectors of various things need to create networks of knowledge and trading, communities of obsession, cliques and cabals. Yet the collector is solitary, because a collection is controlled by that one person, the person who has built and shaped it, the person who wields power over it. Collecting is about control of what is in and what is out of the collection. Regardless of whether the collection is of priceless art or of rocks picked up off the street, it is for the collector a type of art in and of itself, because a collection selects from the infinite items of existence and filters them through the collector's sense of their value and connection. Culture becomes refracted through the collector's own values, and the collection is itself a new cultural product.

Collecting, then, is a way to feel a certain sense of power and control in a society where it's easy to feel powerless and out of control. It's a better kind of control than comes from simple acquisition, the getting of stuff, because collecting is a more ordered activity, the collector discriminating, possessing knowledge rather than blind desire.

I know what he means. I normally don't like having company when I go book-hunting because it's distracting to talk to someone while searching the bookshelves or book bins. Unless company is also searching the shelves with me. *wry grin*

As for collecting, well, it does have a tendency to totter between discriminate and outright buying. Forum-ite Shevyk put it harshly for those who can't stop:

We are a diseased people. Or perhaps just troubled. But diseased we are. Upon entering bookstores, we are overcome with an unceasing desire to purchase a book - at least one - before we exit the store.

Quite apt. So unless it's a book I really, really, really got to have, I try to forgo. ("Forgo"- the new watchword for '05. *sigh*) At last glance, some books on a bookstore shelf that caught my eye include Boris Akunin, Iain M. Banks, Peter Straub and James H. Schmitz. But no, I've way too many books already. Enough is enough.

Is it akin to chronic shopping? Maybe. I know sometimes that I have a need to check out a bookstore because I'm melancholic, the way some people do when buying shoes or bags or clothes. But it's a very thin line to cross, whether I'm appeasing myself through the effort of the search or the actual finding and buying a book.

Cheney noted in conclusion:

Where and how does it all end up, though? Is a collector ever satiated? Perhaps the quest is not about items, but about posterity, or even immortality—we accumulate our collections, sifting and sorting them so that should we, by some catastrophe, disappear from the Earth tomorrow, the connections between every item in the collection would be in a perfect state, harmonizing and vibrating in just the right way so as to express our personality better than we did ourselves.

But he also admits this is a wistful fantasy of sorts. Ultimately, I thought it was Zoran Zivkovic, in a short story in Leviathan 3, who warned of such dangers while collecting:

...And it is a well-known fact that books devour space. You can't reverse this law. However much space you give them, it's never enough. First, they occupy the walls. Then they continue to spread wherever they can gain a foothold. Only ceilings are spared the invasion. New books keep arriving, and you can't bear to get rid of a single old one. And so, slowly and imperceptibly, the volumes crowd out everything before them. Like glaciers.

Well, hopefully not.