Solo palabras

 WASHINGTON SQUARE: A writing professor and I would often talk about how writers are hoarders, obsessed with little material things—how, for example, I was obsessed with a little hay cross my mother kept in her drawer. Do you agree that that’s true for writers? Are there any material things you obsess over?

RUEFLE: I can see that little cross made of hay! Though it’s probably straw. Yes, writers are mysteriously attracted to objects that seem to speak to them, either these objects have entered one’s life by association with an event or a person, or they have entered by their own powers of persuasion, as when you find something lying on the street which you can never again part with—I have a terribly chewed-up pencil in my study that entered my life that way. And my entire home is full of such objects, altars full of them, arrangements of them everywhere, and by the time you are my age, things are out of control! I think this speaks to the power of the image, as well as the power of an object to contain a world, not to mention the power of an object to communicate. No two collections are alike, but I have never been to the home of a writer that is void of them. They are not unlike little poems in themselves. Joseph Cornell made a life of them, they were his medium as an artist, and every time I spend too much time in a junk shop, I think of him and feel a little less guilty for spending my days this way, even if my friends look askance at me. These things feed my soul, whether we are talking about a shell found on a beach, a tiny tin man with a watering can, or an ivory Torah reader with the name Rosa carved on it. They feed my imagination.