Collecting is borne of human invention. It is a selection, out of all the known substances and objects in the world, of particular objects that matter to us most. It is finding patterns and rejoining things with a non-carbon-based kinship. It is a gathering of objects that have been scattered with much less care than is given to their retrieval. 

Many writers and artists collect. Many people I collect in the imagined community of The Examined Life also collect. From Charles Darwin, who collected geological and botany samples that formed the basis of evolution, to Fernando Pessoa's collection of personas (he developed more than a hundred). From Anna Atkins, whose beloved botanical collections set in motion the world's first photographic book, to Walter Benjamin, whose collections of thousands of quotations were to form his most immense, propulsive work. Had it not been destroyed by the Nazis.

 The relaxing habit of rock collecting includes rock sorting and reorganizing. Morse assists.

To collect is to feel the full magnitude of the shadowy side of love: obsession. But it is also a meaningful pursuit that keeps us engaged and active in the past, present, and future. 

"There is a person who collects sand..." Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 – September 19, 1985) begins his essay on this enigmatic - yet familiar - creature: the collector. "This person travels the world and - on arrival at a seashore, the banks of a river or lake, or desert, or wasteland - gathers a handful of sand and takes it away."

When I read Calvino's essay "Collection of Sand," I imagined a sand collector: do they travel to sand locales to find sand? Is it happenstance? What was the connection between deliberation and chance?

Calvino puts himself in the mind of the collector:

There is a person who collects sand. There is a person who travels the world and—on arrival at a seashore, the banks of a river or lake, or desert, or wasteland—gathers a handful of sand and takes it away. On returning home, thousands of little jars are waiting, lined up on long shelves: inside them the fine grey sand of Lake Balaton, the brilliant white particles from the Gulf of Siam, the red shingle that the Gambia river deposits on its course down through Senegal, all display their not particularly vast array of nuanced colours, revealing a uniformity like the moon's surface, despite the differences in granulosity and consistency, from the back and white sand of the Caspian Sea, which seems to be still bathed in salt water, to the tiniest pebbles from Maratea, which are also black and white, to the fine white powder speckled with purple shells from Turtle Bar near Malindi in Kenya. 

Calvino, a foremost Italian novelist of allegorical fiction, believed literature could transform minds and society. He possessed an expansive mind. The kind that folds over itself and then doubles in size beyond event horizons. When Calvino throws his intellect into and against the world of collecting — sand, maps, gas masks, and whatnot, all gathered in some Paris exhibition he was lucky enough to attend - all singular and human-touched, he wanders in search of language, meaning, and some infinite plurality.

Surveying this anthology of sands, the eye initially takes in only the samples that stand out most, the rust-coloured sand from a dry riverbed in Morocco, the carboniferous black and white grains from the Aran Islands, or the shifting kaleidoscope of reds, whites, blacks and greys that has on its label a name that is even more polychromatic: Parrot Island, Mexico. After this, the minimal differences between one kind of sand and another demand a level of attention that becomes more and more absorbing, so much that one enters into another dimension, into a world that has no other horizons except these miniature dunes. Where one beach of tiny pink pebbles is never the same as another beach of tiny pink pebbles. One has the feeling that this set of samples from the universal Waste Land is on the point of revealing something important to us: a description of the world?

This need to see a universal humanity in the depths of our creations is perhaps unusual for a man who was raised the son of botanists. Then again, what is botany, if not a focus on the life of things, the entirety of meaning in an object?

Botanist Anna Atkins' seed plant collections were supplied to botanists at Kew Gardens and donated to the British Museum in 1865. Learn more how Atkins' love of plants that became the world's first photographic book.

Reading Collection of Sand is transformative, like walking through a museum of humanity, observing everything with an exclusive cross-textual guide. I'm fascinated with objects and have often thought the entirety of an object can be divided into two parts: what we made of them, i.e., their presupposed existence, formation, and materiality, and—often distinct—what we make of them, i.e., how they are imbued with memory, narrative, and meaning. The essays on Collection of Sand written in the few years before Calvino died gather and crest on the question: What was the point?

 Crushed pink shells and black stones from a New Zealand beach. I left with one or two.

Things, especially those that are gathered and contained, act as reflectors. What we see in them is often what we want to see in ourselves or the world. Calvino removes time and material boundaries to see objects as an abstract expression of human meaning.

The fascination of a collection lies just as much in what it reveals as in what it conceals of the secret urge that led to its creation. Amongst the weird collections in the exhibition, one of the most alarming was clearly the collection of gas-masks: out of its case stare green or greyish faces made of canvas or rubber, with round, blind staring eyes, and the snout-like nose like a tin or a supple tube. What spirit motivated this particular collector? A sense of irony but also, I believe, a feeling of terror regarding humanity willing to adopt facial features somewhere between the animal and the mechanical. Or perhaps also a confidence in the resources of anthropomorphism, which invents new forms in the image and likeness of the human face...

Explore this personal attachment and delight in objects in Pablo Neruda's Odes to Common Things, a celebration of memory and life, or some of my earliest essays on The Examined Life on things we make precious through caring and our propensity to collect items that speak of us.

Jars of collected things. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Calvino is the kind of person you want as a travel companion, with his mix of childlike curiosity and wise understanding of the abstract. Whether it be a collection of sand or a space we enter and exit, physical things retain memory and, thus, meaning. In that sense, they hold value unique to each human.

After having turned over the collected objects in his hands and mind's eye, the novelist concludes:

One has the feeling that this set of samples from the universal Waste Land is on the point of revealing something important to us: a description of the world? A collector's secret diary?  [...] I have finally come round to asking myself what is expressed in that sand of written words which I have strung together throughout my life, that sand that now seems to me to be so far away from the beaches and deserts of living. Perhaps by staring at the sand as sand, words as words, we can come close to understanding how and to what extent the world that has been ground down and eroded can still find in sand a foundation and model.

Collection of Sand sheds light on why things are meaningful outside of their purpose, even outside our understanding. Accompany this hefty read with Dani Shapiro's navigation of personal objects she keeps around her writing self or Penelope Lively's remembered things that were the foundation of her memory of self. Calvino's writing would also make a superb companion to Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows, a treatise on how to see an object's beauty beyond its mere aesthetics.