The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of
art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity
comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but
often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How
does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists,
through catalogs, through collections in museums and through
encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to
enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was
2,063, at least according to Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo da
Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping
list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements
in their own right. …At first, we think that a list is primitive
and typical of very early cultures, which had no exact concept
of the universe and were therefore limited to listing the
characteristics they could name. But, in cultural history, the
list has prevailed over and over again. It is by no means merely
an expression of primitive cultures.