Overview
Collections from our Youth
770 days ago
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Categories: Lifestyle
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A.O. Scott, NYT film critic, and Questlove, “Roots” drummer and Oscar winning filmmaker, have recently wrote about their collections of records, toys, CDs, books, memorabilia, etc.
Scott inquires whether the things you loved when you were young will ever make you feel young again? Questlove asks whether collecting is an act of devotion or creation? Everyone has different answers. I collected baseball cards and stamps when I was young. I can’t throw the cards away and enjoy looking at them from time to time. Lots of stamps were given to me by my grandparents and the memories of that relationship are strong when I browse through the albums.
Questlove has 200,000 vinyl records stored and catalogued at a barn. I have 500 in my basement and attic. The records are great reminders of days gone by. I have a few hundred CDs and can’t toss them. Knowing that I can pick up an album or a CD and hold it in my hand feels good. It doesn’t make me feel young but listening to the music feels good.
Collecting books was an addiction. I still have hundreds of books from a variety of genres. I enjoy seeing the books shelved next to other books by the same authors. It is like having “book families” living together. Books take up so much physical space and I was forced to prune my collection. I felt good when I was able to donate boxes of books to charities. The decisions about which books had to go were difficult.
I agree that knowing the collections of my past are still with me is comforting. Connecting with the past via objects is surprisingly satisfying.
How do your collections make you feel?
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Comments from Guests
Having recently cleared an attic of some 40 years worth of ‘stuff’, beside the assorted stamps, coins, and memorabilia, lay artifacts (for lack of a better word) of my early college years. As, for centuries, eastern cultures used an abacus to calculate necessary sums to facilitate trade and quantify one’s business and worldly possessions, in the East it was the slide rule that was the instrument of calculation. Among the inevitable objects frozen in time we can’t let go of, here was this collection of half a dozen slide rules of various precision and manufacture. Representing an era of progress good enough to get to the moon, I treasure these items beyond the others as a symbol of our progress as a species and a personal marker of change. Change is something we tend to resist, at least for myself, but know in our gut is inevitable and necessary. The Chinese have an apothegm…”may you live in interesting times”. Well, these items, to me, are a testimonial that we have indeed done just that.
Posted By : Clements Harold