Response to "The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away"

Deluge = a severe flood.

"should everything, without exception, before his eyes in the form of an enormous paper sea, be considered to be valuable or to be garbage, and then should it all be saved or thrown away?  Given such a relationship, the vacillations in making such a choice becomes agonizing."

• I feel this way every time I feel it necessary to do major cleaning.  It does become amazing to realize how much you keep when you actually take the time to clean it up...  Why is it so hard to throw things away though?  That bank statement from six years ago, really does not need to be kept any longer...
  

"In our memory everything becomes equally valuable and significant.  All points of our recollections are tied to one another.  They form chains and connections in our memory which ultimately comprise the story of our life."

• Memories can be so vivid and important to use.  I definitely would not want to forget everything that happened in my life.  But why do we get so attached to them?  And attached to the things that bring them up?  Memories are just that, memories.  What happened does not exist anymore.  It happened, but is now over.  They aren't really anything to be attached to.

"To deprive ourselves of all this means to part with who we were in the past, and in a certain sense, it means to cease to exist."

• This is an intense sentence.  How can you not exist because you get rid of garbage?  It seems a bit silly to me.  You are not the garbage that you keep around!