The collector

When I was young I had a collection of miniature dictionaries - Russian to English, Spanish to English and all the rest.  They were only a couple of inches in height, and bound in brightly-coloured plastic.  I could speak practically none of the languages, and I had no conceivable use for the dictionaries.  I simply collected them, and aspired to a complete set.  Later on, my collecting became more purposeful.  At the time when I listened to a great deal of classical music on records, I would always go for big boxed sets which offered me the complete X of Y.  Thus one week I would get to know the complete piano music of Ravel, or the complete motets of Gibbons, or the complete string quartets of Shostakovitch.  It was the same with books; the complete corpus of Anglo-Saxon, the complete poems of Robert Browning.  I was a compulsive collector.

I have more or less kicked the habit now, I can pass record and book shops without succumbing to any violent urge to go and fill some lacuna in my many collections.  I recognise what my collecting meant, and what it means for the millions of cigar label, pigeon egg and football scarf collectors up and down the country.  Collecting is about control; it is about order; it is about fear.

Collectors recognise that the world out there is very big - too big for comfort, and much too big ever to be comprehended.  They sense that its chaos threatens them; they crave an order which that world will never supply.  So they create their own, smaller world, and within it they impose their own order.

This is why collectors are at once so disparate and so similar.  What is collected is almost irrelevant.  Ironically, the one thing they seem fanatical about is in fact quite unimportant.  It is the medium, not an end in itself.  Hence, too, the extraordinary range of collecting fads.  From lamp posts to false teeth; from tins of shoe polish to train numbers.

While it is probably true that what we are drawn to collect reflects some deep psychological need within us - stamps for the would-be traveller, coins for the would-be millionaire - and that they provide a socially acceptable outlet for our deepest longings, other factors play a part.  For instance specialisation in collecting - not just cheese labels, but South American cheese labels - helps set the collector apart.  It asserts individuality.  The fractured world of collecting mirrors and sometimes replaces the desire for identity in the real world.

Just as collecting allows a small corner of reality to be controlled, so the choice of specialism allows the collector not only mastery but a sense of prestige.  You, too, can be the acknowledged world expert on bus tickets issued in the Manchester area between 1947 and 1983.  The fact that you are the only person in the world who cares a hoot about this field is irrelevant; the unalterable fact remains that you have validated your own sense of value.  In the last analysis, there is no difference between obsessive collecting and all intellectual endeavour.  The ultimate aim of both is control of a circumscribed domain, and the final reward power through knowledge.  It is simply a question of scale.

(22.11.86)

Index

The career of language

The Indo-European group of languages covers an immense geographical area: from the British Isles in the West to Siberia in the East, and from the Arctic down to India.  Among the hundreds of different members deriving from the single common ancestor are English and the Germanic languages, the Romance languages stemming from Latin, the Celtic family, Greek, Russian and the Slavonic tongues, most of the Indian languages, and many others such as Iranian, Armenian, Latvian and Kurdish.

Although every language in the group has followed a different course of development, they all have one thing in common: over the centuries and millennia since that primal tongue, each has become more basic in terms of its morphology - that is, the endings used to distinguish different parts of verbs, and cases of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and the rest.  This is a continuing process.  Today's English, for example, is still evolving towards simplicity, chipping away at the few remaining subtle distinctions in the language - such as the use of 'whom' rather than 'who'.  Similarly every tongue seems to have gradually lost a case ending here or dropped a letter there, perhaps because everyone seemed to understand what you meant anyway, or it was easier to say, or just for reasons of fashion.

Largely through the efforts of dedicated German philologists in the last century, we have an excellent idea of what changes occurred when.  By looking at the entire Indo-European family, and comparing the features of the ancient language each retained, finding a piece of the jigsaw puzzle now in this tongue, now in that, the scholars managed to reconstruct almost completely the original Indo-European mother-tongue from which all these far-flung varieties emerged. It is a splendid achievement.

Splendid but disconcerting. For what we are presented with is a language deduced from its slimmed-down descendants, and therefore necessarily much more complex than any of them, even Classical Sanskrit, perhaps the nearest we have to it in time - Sanskrit texts date back to around 1500 BC - and hence in appearance.  Cases and forms seem to exist for practically every category of experience imaginable.  But given that, as we have seen, language seems to show an irresistible tendency to become less complicated, how did this amazing tongue ever evolve with such an incredibly rich structure? Are we to imagine the elders of a tribe sitting around defining for their language ever more complicated noun and verb declensions with an almost Teutonic rigour and attention to detail?

It remains a mystery to this day how it all happened, and is likely to stay that way at least until a point in the future when some kind of time travel is possible. Then the world's greatest philologist - probably a German, if such concepts still exist - a life's career founded on the study of this riddle, will be able to return to the age when the original Indo-European language was at its peak, and find out what exactly happened. But imagine her mortification if she were to return to that time and find...nothing. Just a few rudimentary pig-like grunts, the merest sketch of a language. Her life's work in ruins. Perhaps she might be tempted to teach the elders a few basics of Indo-European grammar and vocabulary; just enough to get them going, you understand.…

(26.12.91)

See also Moody Sonnets – Mind Your Language

Index

Talking to myself

After my Part III exams at Cambridge, I decided to teach myself German.  I did this in my room at the top of the Queen’s tower, opposite the chapel and clock tower.  From its windows you had one of the best views in Cambridge, looking out over the plush sward of Trinity’s Great Court, with the Great Hall on the left and the porters’ lodge in the top right-hand corner.  During the month that I had to learn the language, I would often sit in the alcove, watching the world go by, and talking to myself.

In fact I spent most of that period talking to myself in one way or another.  Much of the time it was in German, since I need the sound of a word to learn it.  Interspersed with my constant repetition of words and phrases, mostly out loud, I would commune with myself on nothing at all.  Since my friends had already gone down, I rarely spoke to anyone else.  I can honestly say that during that month I had some of the best conversations ever, and found my mind pullulating with ideas and thoughts.

Similarly, I have found other times of my life when I have been alone fruitful in this way.  Whether this was when I had just moved down to London, and was unemployed and so had nothing better to do, or when I was on holiday wandering the Greek islands, at such times I have found anything and everything was liable to send my thoughts racing after some mental butterfly, only to relinquish it at the sight of another, yet more brightly coloured or elusive.

I remember those times with fond affection, partly because like most memories, they are bathed in a warm glow of nostalgia which smooths out the rough edges of inconvenience, and partly because like youth, they represent a lost time to me.  Today, in the hustle and bustle of my very full yuppie life, I am rarely on my own and never idle.  It is therefore a long time since I have had a really good heart to heart with myself.

Though my present lifestyle has ample compensations, I do miss this talking.  I miss the immediate understanding I can offer, the absence of any need to fill in details or sketch their background. Instead, I can proceed with concocting thoughts at their most fresh and daring.  With myself, the feedback is so instant that the inspiration is rarely lost.  Bouncing an idea back and forth between my split yet unitary self is like an image in two parallel mirrors, shadowing itself to infinity.

I feel less fecund as a result. My thoughts and inspirations are few and far between, I must husband them.  Inevitably my work eats up many.  However, at least those that are left, poor as they may be, become all the richer for being rare and more occasional.  Perhaps that is why I produce these essays when I can, why they represent no drudgery, but an almost self-indulgent luxury.  Often they are sparked off by one of these little illuminations.  After chewing on it for a few minutes, savouring its particular insight, enjoying the afterglow of minor creativity, I will often try to fix it by committing it to a written form.  In the course of filling the page, new thoughts may, sometimes, emerge.  If these thoughts start to match up to the initial inspiration, I begin to feel again the old joys of the interior monologue.  And so do I.

(22.6.86)

Index