"We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die"

Italian novelist Umberto Eco claims that lists are the origin of culture. We want to make sense of the "incomprehensible infinite" and part of the way we try is through organizing thoughts/objects into lists.

Catalogs, museum collections, dictionaries, encyclopedias - humans have all kinds of practical lists. We do this, Eco explains, because we like to think things can go on and on. We have our "humiliating limit" - death - but lists don't. So they occupy us. Soothe us. Inspire us. Keep us going. 

A surprisingly effective writing exercise we did in class recently involved making lists under broad headings such as Time, Shadows, and Interesting Sensations ("the sensation of saying a big word when you're unsure of its meaning"). These are taken from  Suzanne Cleminshaw's clever, whimsical book "The Great Ideas", shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award in '99. Here's her list of Time:   

A clock striking thirteen, the hour of the monkey, high noon in a Western town, Aztecs blowing conch shells at dawn, sundials and hourglasses, schoolroom clocks on hot June afternoons, tenses of verbs, the time it takes for a Chinese painter to draw a perfect cat in a single brush stroke, for a frog to snatch a fly, the time it takes for a hippo to lift its head from the water and check for danger.

Lists spark creativity. Here's two more fantastic headings from Cleminshaw - Glamourous Deaths and Enviable Animal Attributes. Go on, make your own.