Hoarding Minutiae

I am a packrat. A hoarder. A collector. Whatever you want to call it. I make excuses like “it’s genetic” (my grandparents all kept everything “in case it was useful someday”, almost to the point of pathology), “but what if I will want it eventually” and “nostalgia” and in the meantime, books and papers and …..well, mostly books pile up around me.

And right now my mom and my uncles are sorting through my grandfather’s house, and his lifetime of hoarding and saving everything that came through the door. It’s a daunting task, and a stressful one, and a sad one. How do you balance the longing to acknowledge the past with the desire to lead a simple(ish) life yourself, and the space limitations of modern middle-class living?

It’s made even more difficult, emotionally, by the fact that my family has not just a lengthy history, but a strong sense of history. We are all well aware that sometimes the most innocuous-looking things can turn out to be important. I just read a biography of a Tudor woman where most of the information for her life comes from household accounts. But, really, once the account books aren’t of any use for tax purposes or something similar, who wants to keep them around? But they are historically one of the best sources we have for daily life one or two or five hundred years ago.

We want to keep the important things, but how do we know what the important things are? What’s important now may not be important in one or two or five hundred years. And while there is an argument to be made about the cultural knowledge that comes from shifting priorities, I also can’t help but wish that more minutiae survived.

This is one reason that I’m so excited that the Library of Congress has the entire public Twitter archive now. Past Tweets may not be of huge significance (although some are, either culturally or personally), but the collection of cultural minutiae has the potential to be fascinating not only for current sociologists, linguists, and anthropologists, but for future historians as well. I just wish it were so easy to save and store the physical collections of minutiae as well.

(Apparently I really like the word "minutiae"...)