Companion to an Untold Story

Inheritance

122 Inheritance. “The soundest way of acquiring a collection,” saith Walter Benjamin. “For a collector’s attitude toward his possessions stems from an owner’s feeling of responsibility toward his property. Thus it is, in the highest sense, the attitude of an heir, and the most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility.”56 Benjamin makes me feel a bit guilty about the animus with which I’ve portrayed Joel’s conveyance of his things. An heir of the better sort has a duty of care toward items that have been infused with a feeling of responsibility,57 about which, in Joel’s case, there can be no doubt. No matter how paltry the item, he was invested in its transferal into our hands. Though he threw things out, he didn’t just throw them,58 no matter how worthless they might have been in a monetary sense. One does not get rid of a thing lightly, he believed; rather, one exerts oneself to find a home for it, like a lost dog, and a continuing use. 56 Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1986), 66. 57 Of course an heir of the better sort gets the inheritance in the normal sequence: a death occurs and then the inheritance. We received our bounty before Joel died, a reversal entailed by the difficulty of getting the items to us. 58 A stark contrast to my own sense of things. There are 132 files in my My Documents folder that contain the word trash. If Joel were here, he’d want to protest, How come you have these 132 files if you are not a collector? 123 Yet he did not show the same concern for the meaning behind the object, did not tell the story that would have explained its worth (the son’s silent echo of the unforthcoming father in Spin the bottle). I was made heir to an assemblage of things whose stories I did not know. It was for me to accept at face value—on the evidence of his bothering to convey the object, his silent testimony—this truth: the object was valuable, a presumption helped along by the objects’ utility (see World’s Fair). His investment of feeling, accompanied by deflection of questions about why he cared that we have his computer, books, and microscope, may explain Joel’s frustration with Richard’s slowness to follow his instructions (see Mouse). Benjamin also insists on the human frailty of collecting: “The phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner.”59 Does this remark indicate that Joel’s items minus Joel have been emptied of meaning? Hardly so. It indicates instead that only my ownership preserves meaning, and that this meaning is my responsibility. However, the meaning of objects cannot be preserved, despite their transmissibility, for they take on a new charge with a new owner. The objects had a meaning peculiar to Joel, which we were uninformed about. When his collection was transferred to us, inherited, it was changed. It became the collection of a suicide, and that is the only meaning it can have for me as heir. Heir to what exactly? What am I heir to, what am I to remember , to safekeep? I experience a double consciousness and double vision: the objects’ meaning to Joel in his life, the objects alive, as it were, because Joel housed them in his life; and the meaning to me postsuicide, with Joel no longer living through his objects, but interred within. 59 Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 63. ...