The Collectors

Last night I watched one of my favorite films, Everything is Illuminated, with two of my favorite people.  The film is based on the novel of the same name by the very talented and unique Jonathan Safran Foer.  At its most basic level, the story is about a young man, presumably Foer himself, who collects things to memorialize deceased family members and who embarks on a journey to "collect" the memory of his grandfather, about whom he knows very little.  But this journey is not an archaeological dig, a hunt for objects which will fit neatly into Foer's plastic bags stowed away in his leather fanny pack.  Foer is instead searching for a person: the woman (Augustina) who saved his grandfather, who was Jewish, from Nazis in the 1940s.  When Foer and his traveling companions find Augustina's sister, she tells them the truth: Augustina died to protect Foer's grandfather.  Her death on his behalf allowed him to escape anti-Semite Ukraine and marry Foer's grandmother, and by extension allowed Foer to exist.  Forgive my shallow analysis of such a rich and complex work, but I now want to use what I have said to reflect on our motivations for "conducting rigid searches" and on how the trajectories and results of these searches shape and illuminate us.

What are you looking for right now, and how are you going about looking for it?  If you are looking for love, which seems to be our primary concern as human beings, what approach are you taking?  Maybe you are looking for certain qualities in a partner; you may even have a list of requirements by which you rate potential mates.  This approach doesn't seem to have a high success rate, but I don't think that is because having standards is a bad thing.  The issue is one of depth.  If you look for traits (or the absence of traits) in other people without considering why you value (or abhor) that particular trait, and without considering how that preference has shaped you, you will end up with myriad filled plastic bags that obscure rather than reveal the answer.  I realize that "answer" is overly simplistic because finding love propagates a journey filled with questions and littered sparsely with answers, but the questions seem more luminous, less threatening, when we aren't traveling alone.  Anyway, let's say you decide to do a little soul-searching in order to understand why you are looking for whom you are looking for: where should you start?  Foer writes that "everything is illuminated by the light of the past," and I agree.  What has worked and what hasn't in your past relationships?  Try not to dismiss or rationalize or reimagine.  I think you will find that telling yourself the truth and living in that truth will illuminate you in a way that attracts people - not just potential mates, but potential friends as well.  When you know yourself, you allow and invite others to know you.

If, while reading that last paragraph, you were thinking "but I'm not looking for love!", then I must admit that I am delighted that other species are now able to access and participate in the blogosphere, because you aren't human.  No matter what you are looking for, dear friends, you are looking for love in some form.  If you are looking for a career, you are looking for a place where you will feel accepted and valued by others in addition to a vocation that utilizes your particular skill set.  If you are, like Foer, looking for clues about a family member, you are motivated by love of that person.  If you are looking for fame and fortune, your heart is waiting patiently for you to return home, get your bearings and set out again.  That we will never travel without baggage should not discourage us from traveling.  We humans are the collectors, after all.  We accumulate, sort, compartmentalize and organize.  We count and recount, we let the dust gather and we brush it away.  I love us for doing these things because it means we are alive and we know we are going to die, but we don't want to die so we fill our walls and our closets with tangible memories that affirm our own tangibility.  These walls and these stacks are our fortresses, our defense against what lays on the other side of life.  We don't have to tear these fortresses down: we just have to let ourselves out and let other people in.  The light may very well blind us.