The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away

This article was interesting in that it was an engaging narrative of a mysterious man and his entire life of documenting everything. The most powerful parts of the story were the excerpts from the mysterious man. Automatically I pictured a house in my home town that is basically become a junk yard - no one ever sees the man who lives in this huge, scary, cluttered house, but everyone whispers about him and tries to come up with some sort of conclusion as to why he collects all that "stuff " in his front yard.
Back to the text, the one thing that really sticks out to me, even today, is when the man talks about paper, "These streams, waterfalls of paper, we periodically sort and arrange into groups, and for every person these groups are different: a group of valuable papers, a group for memory's sake, a group of pleasant recollections, a group for every unforeseen occasion - every person has their own principle" (33). This passage made me analyse every single piece of paper that my hand touched, and I thought back to "The Street" and I broke down paper into its singular units : trees, pulp, and ink, and whatever is on that paper oddly makes it valuable or invaluable even though they are all of the same chemical makeup. This is just the beginning to understanding humans desire to collect and document.