Who owns who?

As I sit here watching Fantasia for only the 3rd time with my 5-year-old I'm ironically reminded of the futility of possessions. Yeah, yeah. Those who know me with more intimacy than that transmitted by blog entries are sitting agog in their chairs at those words.

The 5-year-old in question did NOT want to watch Fantasia; instead she was dead set on watching Lion King 1 ½ which due to some unknown circumstance has made itself unavailable at the moment. Anyone who has a child this age knows that quickly the whole point of this child's existence became the capture and interrogation of any individual who knew the whereabouts of her lost movie. Clearly, the child has gone from possessing the possessions to being possessed BY the possessions. As is often the case, this caused a particular set of neuro-gnomes (to be the subject of a later pictorial) to bang fervently away in a particular section of my brain.

Preliminarily, we need to determine the purpose of these moving picture things and other forms of art. One of the primary motives for consumption of the arts is the simple visceral reaction invoked by the artwork being consumed. Secondarily, the work acts to expand the general realm of experience for the viewer. Since humans are the sum of all that they see and hear in a lifetime, art makes us better and broader people no matter the format. This being the case, the greatest possible benefit is derived from any artwork at first encounter with subsequent repetitions being naught but further study on an already familiar concept. So now one might ask: what exactly is the purpose of accumulating a library of anything when clearly the true value of every item diminishes with each use? It would seem the only items worth actually owning are those that you wish to sincerely study and refer back to over a long period of time. Surely my 5-year-old can have no plans to study The Lion King in depth over the next 15 years and refer back to it in her doctorate thesis? Doubtful, so then why own any but the keenest and most worthwhile of items? Why spend one's hard-earned monetary resources on items which depreciate in value and take up space causing you to need special furniture or a bigger house? Are we so materialistic as a people that the act of owning the possession is actually more important than its real value?

This is a tough pill to swallow for someone like myself who tends to approach his library like a collector rather than a reader. On one hand, my tendency to hoard makes me want the entirety of world literature at my fingertips. Rationally, I realize the sad truth that despite the moniker of "classic" many of the novels in my collection are, in fact, obscure and valueless crap. At least I feel I'm a step ahead of the people running garage sales piled with Danielle Steele paperbacks and the complete series of Rocky movies on Betamax.