Lists

I hope I was never quite as bad as a list addict but I have to admit that I did always like a list.

Not only things like Top 20 Situation Comedies, Favourite 50 Painters or The Best Places I've Ever Been but also perhaps shopping lists although I rarely make them and if I do I've lost them before I get to the shop. And recently I forgot to get teabags twice.

But the other day I did feel that I ought to compile my own Top 100 Novels and Top 100 Music (by which will be meant 'not pop or jazz'). I found with my Pop 100 that it is best constructed by adding one item a day, something that you are sure belongs in the Top 100, so that when you reach the end, everything has passed the test and if one hasn't thought of it by then, it has had 100 chances and can't be important enough.

And so I began by nominating two choices in both categories and undertook to add one more each night. But I forgot to do it last night and didn't do it the night before, either. And so, it's good either way. Either I'll produce the requisite lists or I will have proved that I've grown beyond it, that there is more to it than classification, gradation and asserting one's own identity by claiming that such a list defines oneself.

Why would one want to do that.

But tonight, both lists are asking for a third item. It could be Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, The Well-Tempered Klavier or Couperin's Lecons de Tenebres. And it could be Andre Gide's Symphony Pastorale or La Peste or The Woodlanders. It is easy enough for the first few weeks with so many obvious choices to pick from. But it doesn't matter does it. It is much more the point that one needs to find time to enjoy all these things rather than put them in order.
The music list could easily make 500 whereas the list of novels might stall before making a hundred. And what I'd ever do about poems is hard to imagine.

Don't expect to see these lists any time soon.