#10: On Archiving Objects and Sentimentality
I’ve always been an archivist. I collect things of sentimental value that remind me of incidents, events, things, and people I like.
To the outside eye, such trinkets may seem innocuous. A cracked watch; a moldy hair cream bottle; a pair of frayed gloves; an old ink pen. But to me, they retain certain core memories. As long as I own these objects, I feel that the memories I have associated with them - and the people who owned them - will live on.
For example, I own several small items that belonged to my late grandfathers. Growing up, both of them were a staple feature in my life.
My maternal grandfather indulged my love for comics and graphic novels - something I continue to enjoy even today. I still remember how he’d ask me to accompany him to the newspaper shop. He’d buy the day’s paper for himself while I’d browse the limited comics there and eagerly pick the ones I wanted. Today, I own a fairly comprehensive comic archive, which I owe to him.
My paternal grandfather had a love of stationery items like typewriters and fountain pens. I still have an ancient ink pen with his initials engraved upon them. He often used it to jot down expenses in a journal he rigorously kept. After he passed, I used it regularly for a while until it lost its material utility. Now it sits in a penholder on my desk.
Unfortunately, his rickety typewriter did not survive my attempts to hammer out (pun intended) prose. It was thrown out before I was mature enough to gauge its sentimental value.
Neither of my grandfathers are alive today. But every time I stumble upon one of these items lying around in my drawer or somewhere in the house, I feel a strange tinge of melancholy.
Perhaps I’m uncomfortable with the idea that a person's memory will completely leave me - unless I have something with which to anchor my memories with them. Which is why I am uncomfortable letting go of such objects, even when they barely have any material use.
For example, my paternal grandfather first subscribed to the magazine Reader’s Digest, more than 40 years ago. Despite the drop in the magazine’s content over the years - both in quality and quantity - my grandmother adamantly continued it because of the memory attached to my grandfather.
However, when she recently wistfully announced that she was planning to stop the subscription, I felt a slight twinge somewhere. It felt like I would lose familiar memories of a loved one, which used to visit me every month when the Reader's Digest came around.
Perhaps this is how one lets go of memories. Not at once, but slowly, drawn out, and over time. When every object associated with it is consigned to the sands of time.
The journalist Raghu Karnad had this epigraph in his book Farthest Field:
“People have two deaths: the first at the end of their lives, when they go away, and the second at the end of the memory of their lives, when all who remember them are gone. Then a person quits the world completely.”