| Our Addiction to Stuff, Part 2: Lessons From the Past |
| Friday, 02 September 2011 | Amy Kaplan | Blog Entry |
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I’ve been impressed with this things/dying/leaving behind/stories polemic over and over again throughout my life. This is partly due to having spent my first few years in an historic house in an historic neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, and then spending the years from age five to 11 in New Mexico exploring ruins and hunting for dinosaur fossils and pottery shards with my father on weekends. I felt from a young age—due to the places I was living—compelled to save my things and I did. Letters, art, papers, journals. Last summer, I again spent quite a bit of time exploring ruins and visiting museums in southern Colorado and New Mexico. When I am in a life transition, I gain comfort by looking to the past. One museum in particular that I visited, Edge of Cedars State Park in Blanding, Utah, has an astounding collection of Ancient Puebloan pottery. There are so many pots there that I found it hard to assimilate the beauty and exquisite workmanship they exhibited. I said to a friend with whom I was visiting the museum, “These people are our Ancient Greeks.” The skill exhibited in the crafting and painting of the pots was overwhelming. While looking at them, I was thinking about the sophisticated masonry I’d be seeing at the ruins I was about to visit. Later in the summer, at other places, I saw some of the jewelry, clothes and other implements they used in daily life. None of this stuff—the houses, the pottery, any of it—was junk. Yet it was all left behind as if it were, and that’s how we know these people. Their stuff and the stories their ancestors tell us about them. While making these pilgrimages and after, I was thinking about my own stuff, which was mostly in storage. What stories did my stuff tell about me and what did I want to keep or let go of? What after all would really be left after I died? There’s an abstraction now in the stuff we have. There is so much of it and, for the most part, we don’t make it ourselves. Someone else does. Someone else far away, often working in conditions and living lives that would cause shame to the purchasers if they’d notice where their things came from and who made them. Perhaps this explains my alienation from the things I own; I don’t know. I do know that, by and large, I simply don’t have the connection to my things that I suspect the ancient Puebloans had. Certainly my things won’t gradually return to the Earth from where they came as the Ancient Puebloans’ stuff would have—if not collected and put in museums for people like me to see and think about. Read Part 1: Freedom From the Burden of Things Additional resources:
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People have a seemingly natural desire for things. A desire to have things and make things. For instance, how do we learn about how other peoples lived in the past? We unearth their things and houses, and examine and speculate. Everyone dies and everyone leaves things behind. The things they leave tell us their story, or rather what we surmise it to be. We put their things together to try to solve what puzzles us about them. 
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