I know I need to come up with a better title than that. I just love finding sentences that both bring meaning forcefully home, and do so with surprising twists and double meanings. This one is a gem, from Collections of Nothting by William Davies King:
"During twenty years of living with my wife, decades of relentless acquisition, I had found ways of weaving my collections into the lattice of our life. Now, brought out from concealment, arranged in heaps, not carelessly but also not artfully, these things looked like signs of hoarding, which is a diagnosis, not a hobby.
So I transported the cumbersummation of me into the Ryder and into my new, unmarried life, in the hope that I might locate myself somewhere in the midst of it."
I'm highly tempted by this book, on several levels. I tend to hoard things. I've just recently recognized, and am taking steps to resolve, that I hoard food. Fabric, yarn, crafty stuff, stuff from my childhood, stuff that I felt that, by keeping, would somehow give me some of the history and permanence I longed for. I'm learning that boxes full of artifacts from my childhood and teenage years don't truly add value to my life now. If I must hold on to them, I'll do so via photograph, and pass them on to someone who will not only love them now, but use them now.
My new definition of waste is hoarding something when someone else could actually be using it.
But back from my omphaloskepsis . . . I love that quote's last sentence, and "cumbersummation". That one's definitely headed for my favorite word list.
