On Collecting

Walter Benjamin from Unpacking My Library

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.

The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property.

For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector - and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be - ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

Walter Benjamin from The Arcades Project; Volute H: The Collector

It suffices to observe just one collector as he handles the items in his showcase. No sooner does he hold them in his hand than he appears inspired by them and seems to look through them into the distance, like an augur.

Possessions and having are allied with the tactile, and stand in a certain opposition to the optical. Collectors are beings with tactile instincts.

Perhaps the most deeply hidden motive of the person who collects can be described this way: he takes up the struggle against dispersion.

The allegorist is, as it were, the polar opposite of the collector. He has given up the attempt to elucidate things through research into their properties and relations. He dislodges things from their context and, from the outset, relies on his profundity to illuminate their meaning. The collector, by contrast, brings together what belongs together; by keeping in mind their affinities and their succession in time, he can eventually furnish information about his objects.

Nevertheless - and this is more important than all the differences that may exist between them - in every collector hides an allegorist, and in every allegorist a collector.

Precisely the allegorist can never have enough of things. With him, one thing is so little capable of taking the place of another that no possible reflection suffices to foresee what meaning his profundity might lay claim to for each one of them.

Hannah Arendt: Introduction to Illuminations by Walter Benjamin

Nothing was more characteristic of him (Benjamin) in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of “pearls” and “corals”. On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection.

Soetsu Yanagi from The Unknown Craftsmen

These good people (collectors) are deceived in this way because they have not got eyes to see with. If they had, they would not be concerned with rarity, perfect condition, or former ownership. There is no real point in collecting unless for the sake of beauty, nor is it truly possible for those who cannot see, for if they persist, their collections are bound to be a jumble of good and bad.