Sir David Attenborough
Hello.
My name’s Will and I’m a music collector.
If my wife or my baby don’t pull me away
from my computer, I can spend hours on end polishing my collection:
renaming files that are slightly wrong, moving files from one section to
another, deleting files that no longer seem to fit, etc. And nothing makes me happier than hunting for
the next great song to add to the collection, and finding a track that makes me
think, “How have I lived all this time without you?”
Am I obsessed? Should I be embarrassed to be a grown man and
to expend so much thought and energy on building and maintaining a little
pyramid of songs? Like an alcoholic
giving up alcohol, should I try to quit the collecting habit completely?
The reason I have been thinking about
giving up my music files is Spotify. The
web site has recently launched in Japan.
For those who don’t know, it’s a service which allows you to listen to
music on line. They have a huge
collection of millions of songs to choose from, including many rarities
that I’ve wanted to find for years.
Suddenly I have access to them all with a few clicks. And if I don’t mind occasional adverts, I
don’t even have to pay money to listen.
How can my carefully polished and crafted
little pyramid of songs compete with the millions and millions of Spotify? My little collection is like an ant hill
standing before the Great Pyramid at Giza.
I don’t collect old vinyl records or even
cds. It’s really just the music itself,
kept as files on my computer. So it
isn’t taking up much space. I could keep
both the ant hill and also have access to the Great Pyramid of Spotify. The only reason to get rid of the whole of my
collection would be an occasional sense of embarrassment, of wasted time over a
solitary obsession. So is it
really so embarrassing?
I remember listening to Sir David
Attenborough talking about the subject of collecting in some radio lectures
which were broadcast on the BBC. He is a
famous British nature documentary filmmaker.
He admitted to collecting many things over his life: stamps, fossils,
bus tickets and books about New Guinea.
With some embarrassment he said that even as an elderly man, he
collected obsessively. He couldn’t stop
himself from buying books about New Guinea, even if he found them boring.
He also went on to talk about why some men
like him became obsessive collectors. He
claimed that while some women collect, it is overwhelmingly a male phenomenon. And he pointed out that in early human
history men had the task of hunting for meat to bring back to the family or
tribe. And he felt that deep inside men,
there is still a desire to hunt – to spend time searching for something
treasured and to bring it back. And he
felt that modern life gave few opportunities to satisfy this desire directly,
so we satisfy it indirectly with our collections.
So I’m not alone. Perhaps most of the men who read the opening
lines of today’s blog thought, “Yeah, so what?
I’m a music collector too.” If
collecting is so important to the male mind, then if I give up collecting
songs, I’ll start collecting stamps or train numbers instead. It could be worse.
Have you heard the song “Ghosts” by the
folk band Lau? It’s in my “Celtic folk”
section. Come and have a listen...
Vocabulary:
an affliction – an illness; something which
negatively affects you and you have to bear
hours on end – hour after hour; a great
many hours
to be obsessed – to be so focussed on
something that you cannot stop thinking about it
a rarity – something which is rare or very
uncommon
solitary – done or existing alone
a fossil – the ancient remains of the bones
of animals found in rocks
a phenomenon – an observed fact; something
which is seen to happen
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