- Joined
- Jun 21, 2002
- Messages
- 2,283
Thought this article was interesting, Use it to justify knife collecting if you need to 
:
Why we mercilessly mock people who collect things
By DAVID MACFARLANE, The Globe
One of the least charitable characteristics of people who do not collect things is their tendency to make fun of people who do. "Ha," we say -- and here I admit to being numbered among the non-collectors of the world -- "Ha. Look at that poor, anal-retentive monomaniac. The one with the gap between his black socks and grey flannels. Look at that bloodless pinhead, that compulsive introvert, that emotionally stunted obsessive, that benighted, self-loathing, physically inhibited, sexually terrified, unloved product of a miserable childhood probably spent on Cluny Drive."
Or words to that effect.
And why do we say that, I wonder? Why do we go "Ha!" to people who collect butterflies, or matchboxes, or stamps? Well, we go "Ha!" because we view ourselves as restless generalists, don't we? We think that our unfettered curiosity, our unbridled passions, our untamed appetites are too freewheeling to be devoted to a sustained single note. "Ha!" we say to those creepy lepidopterists over there beside the formaldehyde bottles. "Ha!" we say to yon weedy phillumenists. "Ha!" to the predictably myopic, sticky-fingered philatelists -- the ones who formed intense little clubs in school, as if lunch-hour weren't short enough, and who didn't notice puberty because they were too busy with George V black farthings or reversed, blue-inked Channel Islands tuppenny Jubilee issues. "Ha!" Not for us the magnifying glass, and the pins, and the glue, and the baggy cardigan. We are not so pathetically limited. We cannot be so constrained. We are the explorers of a vast and varied continent of intellectual pursuit, not the blinkered investigators of a tiny province, of a picayune village, of the back of a musty closet in a dreary hallway in a damp basement flat. Our interests are too vastly catholic, our thirst for knowledge is too unquenchable, our horizons are too broad. Minds such as ours cannot be wed to a single subject. We don't have time to collect butterflies, or matchboxes, or stamps because we are too busy.
Yes? Too busy doing what exactly? I'm curious. What are we restless generalists too busy doing? Too busy watching Frasier to collect Etruscan antiques? Is that it? Too busy on the StairMaster or at the hair salon or having a tantrum at Ikea to hunt down a Johnny Bench baseball card or a Daumier lithograph on e-Bay? Too busy picking up the dry-cleaning to become devoted to coins or comic books or African sculpture? Too busy sitting in traffic, returning the videos, waiting on the help line, applying teeth whitener, sending e-mails, downloading files, reading junk mail, decoding instructions, filling out forms, answering telemarketers, checking our messages, flipping through Architectural Digest?
Or, just too busy working? There's always that. I, for instance, am too busy writing this wide-ranging, speciously diverse column to spend too much time looking too deeply into some single, consuming obsession. I know, I know. It could be worse. I could have a job. After all, writing a column is not digging a ditch. Generally, there is a reason for a ditch. But for all its attendant status, and believe me, in certain circles the acclaim is such that I can almost guess what it's like to be somebody who knows somebody who knows Atom Egoyan, writing a column -- I think you'll admit -- is not sitting in a wingback chair and sipping one of the five or six hundred single-malts I keep on hand in the unlikely event that there is someone on whom time weighs so heavily they want to drop by for a nosing and a bracing discussion of peat bogs. Far be it from me to suggest that writing a column is without literary merit, but I think we can safely say it's not donning white cotton gloves, adjusting an ascot, and lovingly perusing a Sylvia Beach edition of Ulysses, or a first-printing of Gibbon, or an extremely rare unsigned volume by Peter Newman.
The sad truth is, we who do not collect things are deeply and bitterly envious of people who do. And the reason for this is simple. We are completely distracted by modern life. We are going mental. And they, so it seems, are not.
Hal Jackman, for instance, is tall, imperious-looking, rich, and he has collected toy soldiers for most of his life. It can't be mere coincidence that he's sane. He has served as Ontario's lieutenant-governor and is currently the chancellor of the University of Toronto -- although such appointments are givens, really. If you're a tall, imperious-looking, rich, toy-soldier collector and you know a hawk from a handsaw you kind of automatically become lieutenant-governor of Ontario or chancellor of the University of Toronto. They pretty much just wave you in. But I mention Hal Jackman here because in 1991 he donated what the Royal Ontario Museum scholar, K. Corey Keeble (and how, I wonder, did his parents know he was going to become a museum scholar when they named him K. Corey Keeble?), has called "the largest and finest toy-soldier collection ever offered to a Canadian public institution." It comprises almost 5,000 lead-alloy toy soldiers manufactured by the English firm, Britains Ltd., between 1893 and 1966. And now the ROM has just published a handsomely designed, beautifully organized book that documents Jackman's remarkable collection.
I expected to make fun of the book -- because that is what we churlish non-collectors do when confronted with the pure passion of a collector. But, to tell you the truth, I was fascinated by Toy Soldiers. I was fascinated by the intensity of focus and the sustained enthusiasm and the detailed thoroughness that is so apparent in such a collection. I was fascinated by the little Gordon Highlanders, and the Airborne Infantry, and the Royal Marines, and the 12th Lancers. But possibly, I'm biased. Possibly, I am not so very different from Hal Jackman. After all, my parents gave me a box of Britains Royal Horse Guards when I was a boy, and Dalton McGuinty has promised me I can be lieutenant-governor if I help put Liberal signs on lawns during the next provincial election.
And anyway, if there's one thing that, as a writer, I respect, it's doing something completely pointless, and doing it well.
:Why we mercilessly mock people who collect things
By DAVID MACFARLANE, The Globe
One of the least charitable characteristics of people who do not collect things is their tendency to make fun of people who do. "Ha," we say -- and here I admit to being numbered among the non-collectors of the world -- "Ha. Look at that poor, anal-retentive monomaniac. The one with the gap between his black socks and grey flannels. Look at that bloodless pinhead, that compulsive introvert, that emotionally stunted obsessive, that benighted, self-loathing, physically inhibited, sexually terrified, unloved product of a miserable childhood probably spent on Cluny Drive."
Or words to that effect.
And why do we say that, I wonder? Why do we go "Ha!" to people who collect butterflies, or matchboxes, or stamps? Well, we go "Ha!" because we view ourselves as restless generalists, don't we? We think that our unfettered curiosity, our unbridled passions, our untamed appetites are too freewheeling to be devoted to a sustained single note. "Ha!" we say to those creepy lepidopterists over there beside the formaldehyde bottles. "Ha!" we say to yon weedy phillumenists. "Ha!" to the predictably myopic, sticky-fingered philatelists -- the ones who formed intense little clubs in school, as if lunch-hour weren't short enough, and who didn't notice puberty because they were too busy with George V black farthings or reversed, blue-inked Channel Islands tuppenny Jubilee issues. "Ha!" Not for us the magnifying glass, and the pins, and the glue, and the baggy cardigan. We are not so pathetically limited. We cannot be so constrained. We are the explorers of a vast and varied continent of intellectual pursuit, not the blinkered investigators of a tiny province, of a picayune village, of the back of a musty closet in a dreary hallway in a damp basement flat. Our interests are too vastly catholic, our thirst for knowledge is too unquenchable, our horizons are too broad. Minds such as ours cannot be wed to a single subject. We don't have time to collect butterflies, or matchboxes, or stamps because we are too busy.
Yes? Too busy doing what exactly? I'm curious. What are we restless generalists too busy doing? Too busy watching Frasier to collect Etruscan antiques? Is that it? Too busy on the StairMaster or at the hair salon or having a tantrum at Ikea to hunt down a Johnny Bench baseball card or a Daumier lithograph on e-Bay? Too busy picking up the dry-cleaning to become devoted to coins or comic books or African sculpture? Too busy sitting in traffic, returning the videos, waiting on the help line, applying teeth whitener, sending e-mails, downloading files, reading junk mail, decoding instructions, filling out forms, answering telemarketers, checking our messages, flipping through Architectural Digest?
Or, just too busy working? There's always that. I, for instance, am too busy writing this wide-ranging, speciously diverse column to spend too much time looking too deeply into some single, consuming obsession. I know, I know. It could be worse. I could have a job. After all, writing a column is not digging a ditch. Generally, there is a reason for a ditch. But for all its attendant status, and believe me, in certain circles the acclaim is such that I can almost guess what it's like to be somebody who knows somebody who knows Atom Egoyan, writing a column -- I think you'll admit -- is not sitting in a wingback chair and sipping one of the five or six hundred single-malts I keep on hand in the unlikely event that there is someone on whom time weighs so heavily they want to drop by for a nosing and a bracing discussion of peat bogs. Far be it from me to suggest that writing a column is without literary merit, but I think we can safely say it's not donning white cotton gloves, adjusting an ascot, and lovingly perusing a Sylvia Beach edition of Ulysses, or a first-printing of Gibbon, or an extremely rare unsigned volume by Peter Newman.
The sad truth is, we who do not collect things are deeply and bitterly envious of people who do. And the reason for this is simple. We are completely distracted by modern life. We are going mental. And they, so it seems, are not.
Hal Jackman, for instance, is tall, imperious-looking, rich, and he has collected toy soldiers for most of his life. It can't be mere coincidence that he's sane. He has served as Ontario's lieutenant-governor and is currently the chancellor of the University of Toronto -- although such appointments are givens, really. If you're a tall, imperious-looking, rich, toy-soldier collector and you know a hawk from a handsaw you kind of automatically become lieutenant-governor of Ontario or chancellor of the University of Toronto. They pretty much just wave you in. But I mention Hal Jackman here because in 1991 he donated what the Royal Ontario Museum scholar, K. Corey Keeble (and how, I wonder, did his parents know he was going to become a museum scholar when they named him K. Corey Keeble?), has called "the largest and finest toy-soldier collection ever offered to a Canadian public institution." It comprises almost 5,000 lead-alloy toy soldiers manufactured by the English firm, Britains Ltd., between 1893 and 1966. And now the ROM has just published a handsomely designed, beautifully organized book that documents Jackman's remarkable collection.
I expected to make fun of the book -- because that is what we churlish non-collectors do when confronted with the pure passion of a collector. But, to tell you the truth, I was fascinated by Toy Soldiers. I was fascinated by the intensity of focus and the sustained enthusiasm and the detailed thoroughness that is so apparent in such a collection. I was fascinated by the little Gordon Highlanders, and the Airborne Infantry, and the Royal Marines, and the 12th Lancers. But possibly, I'm biased. Possibly, I am not so very different from Hal Jackman. After all, my parents gave me a box of Britains Royal Horse Guards when I was a boy, and Dalton McGuinty has promised me I can be lieutenant-governor if I help put Liberal signs on lawns during the next provincial election.
And anyway, if there's one thing that, as a writer, I respect, it's doing something completely pointless, and doing it well.
, safer than chasin after married women
