To the Editor:
When you rise in the morning, is the first thing on your mind how to curate the day? If not, you are in all likelihood making a colossal blunder. Without careful curation the day will most probably go off the beam. It’s a ticket to chaos and confusion, to being surrounded by molecules of disorder. Quickly you will lose count of all your majors. And evening is still hours away. Even during breakfast irresolvable paradoxes will weigh heavily, blighting the enjoyment of freshly squeezed orange juice purchased the night before. If you have not read and absorbed Zoe Zaplander’s Curation for Dummies (now in its 8th edition,) the chances of reaching noon without a shattered coherence has all but disappeared. Alarmingly you will sense your mind rapidly unwinding. Unhingement is nigh.
If instead of retreating at this juncture to the elemental negativity of your basement, you recklessly plunge headlong into the afternoon absent wise curation, you will become aware that the right social lattices to frame and support your interactions have totally collapsed. Unsettling images of proleptic decay and decrepitude will crowd out all other thoughts. (Except perhaps an unrestrained desire to go to the dentist.)
Having barely survived the lunch hour the uncurated afternoon will surround you with a hovering incoherence and an anguished volatile intensity. Things only get worse. For example, not curating the dinner wines will leave your guests perplexed and vowing never to return. Later, desperately trying to sleep without curated preparation, you will feel only the constant undulation of roiling emotions.
Need I say more? I believe it might have been Marshall McLuhan who so rightly said, “You become what you curate.”
Allan Irving
Swarthmore
