It's a 17th-century portrait. But I can't see things if they don't move. Motion minus memory. Disordered glut incites iconoclasm. Nicholson Baker's tales of librarians who delight in dumping their card catalogs are not all fictions.
Agencies commend and promote archivists by how radically they sift and how ruthlessly they discard.
Like Corraghessen Boyle's couple addicted to acquisition, we hire exterminators who leave us utterly denuded. Heritage inchoate Heritage accumulates almost by definition. Collecting is for many the raison d'etre of stewardship. We amass and hoard for pleasure, and then persuade ourselves it is good for us, for others, and for posterity. England's National Trust has made Calke Abbey a memorial to Harpur-Crewe's mania.