We like them, don’t we, “things to do” scribbled on memo pads or the backs of envelopes, tapped into our phones? We log the birds we’ve spotted, keep track of foods to avoid, note which Lego sets we’ve given the grandkids the past few Christmases. Each December we flip through magazines with their Ten Best this, Ten Worst that, Ten Most Everything Else of the year, listings ephemeral as our resolutions.
“List, list, O list!” says the ghost of Hamlet’s father, sounding more like Walt Whitman revving up for one of his poetic catalogues than a specter in medieval Denmark. And though I realize the ghost is urging his son to “listen,” I can’t help muttering the line whenever life seems but one inventory or listicle after another.
When I worked at a bookstore decades ago we sold copy after copy of The Book of Lists, four hundred pages no one, it seemed, could do without. You could look up the most intelligent breeds of dogs, history’s stupidest criminals, the worst places to hitchhike in the U.S., even the most common misquotes from Shakespeare. (King Hamlet’s ghost was on that list, I think). The book went through several editions, sequels, spin-offs. They make quite a list of their own by now.
At my age, I’m supposed to have a Bucket List—languages to learn and world capitals yet to see, skydiving lessons to sign up for, friends and exes I should re-connect with. But there’s no roster in my head, no table of names or places, nor any set of bullet points reminding me of risks untaken. I have no great compulsion to etch my name among those who have scaled some fearsome cliff, no annal in which I’ve sought a mention. (I’d rather quaff a Guinness than try to make it into that book of lists.)
“Don’t make the national news,” my wife Sharon likes to say in concluding her list of reminders whenever someone in our family is about to travel. Much more adventurous than I (see skydiving, above, not to mention ziplining through the treetops of a national forest), she nevertheless is like me in preferring a place among the countless anonymous, those Z-listers far out of the spotlight, whole city blocks from the red carpet. No wonder, after all these years, she’s still at the top of my list.
James Scruton lives in McKenzie, TN
