Collecting as meaning-making
Somewhere in my parents’ basement, hidden away by other boxes and crates, is a small box of ephemera from my childhood and youth.
My parents didn’t keep much from when I was growing up—we didn’t have space for it at the time, and we’ve never really been much for keeping things without lasting significance or use—but they’ve managed to fill one box with a few things they think capture my time when I was younger.
Recently, while L and I were away and Zoya was staying with them for a few days, my parents brought out the box and showed Zoya its contents. In it were things I had forgotten: old NY Jets merchandise, stuffed animals, a football, a bevy of stuff I had cast away as I grew up. Right at the bottom, however, was one thing that piqued my interest when they sent me the photo of them digging through the box: one of my stamp collection binders.
In my heyday, I had several binders and specialized stamp books filled with postage stamps. I was an avid collector and admirer: I went to stamp trade shows, and sometimes I even called myself a philatelist. We didn’t have much money, but whatever money I got from gifts or my meagre allowance went towards stamps.
My main object of interest was stamps about Scouting. Scouting was my primary activity back then—many of my friends were made there and so much of my time was spent in Scouting activities—and the collection of Scout stamps felt like a perfect marriage of two of my favorite things. At trade shows and collector shows, I would gravitate towards booths that had unique stamps from places around the world, with the hopes of finding something that had to do with Scouts in those countries. I ended up amassing quite a specialized collection, including some rare issues and first day covers.
(My collection included some of the stamps pictured in these blog posts, and so many more from all around the world.)
Most of my collection is gone now, save for one small binder in the box at my parents’ house. I slowly lost interest in collecting as I grew older and discovered other hobbies and interests. I wish I still had that collection though: it captures so much of what captivated me growing up and I’d love to be reminded of that from time to time.
Collecting things seems to be a common interest of people around the world. We gravitate towards things that have meaning for us, and keep those markers of meaning close to us, amassing more of the objects as we give them more meaning. Elsie Morales asks why we collect things and then answers that question quite beautifully:
The things we keep and arrange become part of our environment, identity, and how we communicate with the world, both as individuals and as societies. Collecting is a deeply meaning-making activity: it weaves memories and longing into the everyday spaces we inhabit.
She reminds us that “the evolution of societies has always been defined by the objects they produce,” and that keeping and collecting those things we produce define who we are in the space and time where we live.
Morales goes on share three themes of collecting, as per John Elsner and Roger Cardinal’s The Culture of Collecting:
Desire and nostalgia (missing things or wanting to recapture moments), saving and loss (holding onto what's in danger of disappearing), and the urge to erect a permanent and complete system against the destructiveness of time (the desire to build something that says "I was here and this mattered.").
If we are defined by the things we collect, then who was I, when I was younger, surrounded by all those Scout stamps? What did that collection have to say about me, about the person I was and the person I was going to become? What was I trying to remember, or to save from time? And what does it mean that I have lost that collection?
We spent a lot of time in museums on our recent trip to Florence (I’ll write more about that later), and I have been thinking about how we call the contents of a museum a “collection” or a collection of collections. Each museum has something to say about the world, and they voice their thoughts through a collection of art and objects. What does it mean that we saw Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabines minutes before gazing up at Michelangelo’s David? What were the curators—the collectors, in effect—trying to tell us?
There is a voice to a collection—whether in a museum or in our homes—that tells a tale borne of the collector. Why was something saved and others discarded? These are choices that tell a narrative: our collection itself is art that tells a story about the people we are and what we choose to preserve—what is, in fact, important to us.
I don’t tend to collect things anymore: I like getting rid of things that don’t seem to have practical use, and even things like books (which I used to collect and cherish) are accessed mostly on my devices instead of in physical copy. L is great at tempering my trend towards getting rid of things, because she reminds me that physical objects are imbued with memory; whenever we travel somewhere new, she gets a tree ornament and a magnet, which reminds us of our travels as we reach into the fridge or put up our tree at Christmas every year.
Still, I think I’d like to start a collection of my own, again. I don’t know what I would collect—I haven’t found the one physical thing that grabs my interest the way postage stamps once did—and I don’t know what I would do with that collection or even where to keep it. I do know, however, that if collecting is a meaning-making activity, it’s something that I would enjoy pursuing again.
What do you collect? What is the meaning you are making, the stories you are telling from that collection? Write me back and let me know: I’d love to learn more about you through what you choose to collect.
A poem
The Hum
Maggie Smith
It's not a question
without the mark: How do we live
with trust in a world that will continue
to betray us. Hear my voice
not lift at the end. How do we trust
when we continue to be betrayed.
For the first time I doubt
we'll find our way back. But how
can we not. See how the terminal
mark allows a question
to dress as statement and vice versa.
Sometimes if I am quiet and still,
I can hear a small hum inside me,
an appliance left running.
Years ago I thought it was coming
from my bones. The hum
kept me company, and I thought
thank god for bones, for the fidelity
of bones—they'll be there
until the end and then some.
Now what. How to continue.
I've started calling the hum the soul.
Today I have to hold
my breath to hear it. What question
does it keep not asking
and not asking, never changing
its pitch. How do I answer.
Some links
I listen to a lot of audiobooks these days, and can appreciate the impact of a good narrator. I found this insight into the world of audiobook narrators—and the challenges coming for the profession in the years ahead—to be a fascinating look at something that is so central to how I appreciate literature these days.
This first-person piece by an audiobook narrator—diving deep into his relationship to his father, to technology, to health, and to storytelling—is a perfect encapsulation of why human narration is so important in the age of AI voices.
“I also understand that my grandmother’s mode of resistance was fixing her face.” Another gem by Mike Monteiro, this time talking about status and how we present ourselves.
D’Angelo has been one of my favorite musicians since I first heard Brown Sugar almost thirty years ago, so I was devastated to hear of his passing from cancer. Wesley Morris has a nice remembrance of him and his music, and Saeed Jones wrote a short but poignant piece about what kinds of people in culture gets to grow old.
You might not care about boxing (I do, a lot) much, but this piece on the Thrilla in Manila, and all the stuff—political and cultural—that came with it, is a brilliant piece of writing.
Nina West on why Drag Queen Story Hour matters and how libraries and reading are important facets to the feeling of belonging.
I will read anything Ta-Nehisi Coates writes; this piece on the killing of Charlie Kirk and the impact on our political and cultural landscape is insightful.
My friend Daphnée wrote an amazing paper in New Sociology Journal of Critical Praxis about freedom as a dialogue—rather than end-point—and examines that concept through art.
“We've made status the organizing drama of daily life.” Joan Westenberg on airline boarding queues and building status into our everyday lives.
Interesting pitch by Matt Webb about a movement towards “vertical tv.” But I think I’m more on Robin Sloan’s side saying that we’re just in a “vertical parenthesis.”
I joke that we’re outsourcing our memories and cognitive skills to our phones, but it’s true in many ways: there are so many things that we don’t “know” anymore, and instead rely on access to a world of information and ease:
Acquiring these bodies of knowledge is part of what makes life great. Learning a new language is brain-melting, soul-enlarging. Learning your way around a town builds a mental map of surprises and one-way streets. Hoarding coins for next time means you have happy little envelopes and baggies of metal tucked away in a drawer, carrying hopes of future travels, for your children to find after you die.
A great profile of Judd Apatow. (I’m a sucker for a good celebrity profile.)
A beautiful rumination on snails, and life:
Snails are many things but they are not weak. Snails are strong. They can carry up to seventy times their weight on their backs. Snails are brave: they are physically incapable of retreating. Snails are clever. What better way to save time commuting than to carry your house on your back.
The always-amazing Jaya Saxena on foodie culture and the term “foodie” and how food permeates everything, these days:
To be called a “foodie” now is the equivalent of being hit with an “Okay, boomer.” But while the slang may have changed, the ideals the foodie embodied have been absorbed into all aspects of American culture. There may be different words now, or no words at all, but the story of American food over the past 20 years is one of a speedrun of cultural importance. At this point, who isn’t a foodie?
The Atlantic has collected a list of 65 essential children’s picture books, and it’s amazing how many of these have been in our home, whether from being purchased or from the library, in the past five years. We’ll be using this list to guide our future reading, too. (The Slate 25 best picture books from the past 25 years is a treasure trove of recommendations, too.)
Tim Urban shares some truths about toddlerhood that are amusing yet accurate.
A question many of us are asking these days: is moderate drinking okay?
Zoya is addicted to the songs from KPop Demon Hunters even though she’s never seen the movie and doesn’t really know much about the story, so this was a pertinent read: How Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters became Gen Alpha’s Frozen.
I like the idea of “deep casual hosting” because it removes the stress and pretension and pomp from having people over and emphasizes how just being together builds community. (This is how we approach hosting at our place: casual, with a focus on people, not the stuff around them.)
This sentence in the introduction of Kai Brach‘s most recent newsletter really hit home:
We've normalised giving our attention almost exclusively to people who already have obscene amounts of influence. And we amplify them by watching. The power law in action: a few rise to the top, and we keep them there by never looking away.
And because it’s impossible to escape, here’s AI corner, where I link to stuff ostensibly about AI but mostly about culture:
In no surprise to anyone: “Artificial intelligence tools used by doctors risk leading to worse health outcomes for women and ethnic minorities, as a growing body of research shows that many large language models downplay the symptoms of these patients.”
Look, the word "vibe" has no place at work or in it. If you want to vibe something then find a club at 2AM, slam a few Red Bulls, and knock yourself out. Because vibe anything--coding, analyzing, prioritizing, strategizing, designing, problem-solving--doesn't make anything more efficient, it just shifts the work elsewhere, and often on the people who are already buried as it is.
On teaching students with the rise of AI:
Some mornings I forget my lanyard. Or the bathroom on the third floor is locked for reasons no one can explain. Or I bring handouts for the wrong section. I get distracted mid-lecture trying to remember the word for that thing that's _almost _a synecdoche. Someone raises their hand to ask a question I don't know how to answer, and I say the wrong thing. Or I say the right thing but too quickly, and someone flinches and I realize--too late--it wasn't the question that mattered but the silence behind it.
And still: they come back next week. They sit down. They open laptops and notebooks and half-listen with the kind of distracted attention that is still, somehow, real.
AI will never know how to read that kind of listening.
Anil writes about how the hype around AI takes away from the actual good it can do:
Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they've been over-hyped, the fact they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.
I will 100% always link to something Jenny Zhang writes about technology and culture, so I’m closing here with her excellent piece on choosing friction even when tech promises to remove it:
It is not virtuous to suffer, and discomfort is not noble. But everything in my life that is worth having, love and friendship and art and community, I found by fighting my way through discomfort. Pain does not mean growth, but growth does require pain. It is so easy in our rotten modernity to choose convenience and ease, to avoid friction at all costs and tell ourselves it is self-care. I choose the friction of refusal because I worry that if I forget how to be uncomfortable, I will forget how to grow. Refusal, like acquiescence, is habit-forming.