The totally curious are never satisfied – an unfortunate malady that can affect (effect? l couldn’t be bothered looking it up) a person throughout their lifetime. Being curious is in itself an intriguing notion, casting aside the easy answer of drive for knowledge or even something more mundane such as curiosity being an innate part of our survival instincts l often wonder why a person can be totally disinterested in say, spoons, then be totally enamored with another silly thing – such as stamps.
Should another being ever (well, let’s be realistic here and say when they do, it will happen let’s not fool ourselves) look upon our society (maybe an interstellar archaeologist will use us as their pet project) and find these certain collections, different across the globe to what end will they believe these collections were for? By illustration imagine you and your friend have a cat. Then, sometime later after your beloved moggys unfortunate demise you are going through their personal effects (or affects?) and come across the rather startling discovery of a collection of novelty party hats.
Stored in secrecy it appears your cat (or bunyip, the creature itself is unimportant just the habit) has been collecting, tagging and storing novelty hats en masse. After your initial surprise has worn off and you have had a stiff drink to round off the edge you call your friend whose cat has also shuffled off this mortal coil to let them know of your discovery. As you lift the receiver to your ear the tinkle of ice in a tumbler in your ear tells you your friend has also had to take a little moment to themselves after a shock. You are duly informed that his or her cat or bunyip has a small collection of their own…..moist towelettes from varying fast food conveniences around the state, carefully stored and rated by moistness.
Now here is the problem with looking back and trying to reconstruct the collectors mind from an outsiders point of view – how do you categorize this categorization of cat collecting and collating? How would Xenox 8/9+ from planet Johnson prepare a report for his Galactic Overlord in relation to the collections us as curious humans have? How would Xenox 8/9+ explain the fact that in one room in one home it appears a person has been hoarding small sticky backed pictures that bear some relation to the planetary notification system and in another room a man or woman has been hoarding a particular type of eating implement?
Trying to categorize our rampant and rather unrelated collecting would l fear potentially cause the implosion of a mind from outside our sphere of understanding – l hope this does not cause our new alien overlords to bear us any ill-will due to our innate curiosity and need for collecting.
