A friend (thank you Petra) has just lent me Susan Sontags novel from 1991 The Volcano Lover.
I had asked to borrow it because, having read a lot about the Napoleonic Wars at sea by way of Patrick O Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin seafaring epics I was anxious to learn more about Jack Aubrey’s great hero, Horatio Nelson.
This novel is about Nelson’s affair with Emma Hamilton but more about her cuckolded husband Sir William Hamilton who is the Volcano Lover of the title and in fact its hero.
It is obvious from the first time we meet him that Sontag has little time for Nelson and reserves her admiration for Sir William and his two passions, for Vesuvius and for collecting beautiful antiquities.
Sontag, who is much better known for her intellectual essays than as a novelist goes on to praise the role of the collector.
I was reading a piece from this novel this morning which is so amazingly apposite to my blog from yesterday that I am going to quote it to you.
Sontag, correctly, allies the role of collector to that of list maker:

“The list is itself a collection, a sublimated collection. One does not actually have to own the things. To know is to have….. it is to value them, to rank them, to say they are worth remembering or desiring.
What you like: your five favourite flowers, spices, films, cars, poems, hotels, names, dogs, inventions, Roman Emperors, novels, actors, restaurants, paintings, gems, cities, friends, museums, tennis players….just five.”

I read this and immediately whooped out loud. At last I had a perfect intellectual justification for my “Give Me Five” Campaign.
Thank You Susan Sontag!