Space: the final frontier.(City Desk)

The New York papers featured an unlikely year-end story: Patrice Moore, a 43-year-old Bronx man, was trapped for two days in his studio apartment when a decade of magazines, newspapers, books, and catalogs fell in on him. After the landlord became aware of his plight, cops and firemen spent more than an hour digging him out (he is okay). Mr. Moore was everywhere compared to Langley and Homer Collyer, brothers who were found trapped in their East Harlem brownstone in March 1947, amidst tons of junk including 14 grand pianos and an automobile chassis. The Collyer brothers were not okay: Langley had died in a booby trap he had set for burglars; blind and bedridden Homer had starved to death.

What hold do an outer-borough mishap and a weird tale of the Truman administration have on our imaginations? The fascination of motive, for starters. Hoarders are afflicted; in the signal-flare glow of their pain, passions seem ten feet tall. Many hoarders are motivated by love: They cannot bear to part with anything ephemeral, dilapidated, old. They see the kinship that human flesh has with broken umbrellas and last year's rent statements. Saving their stuff, they ask the honorable court to be spared themselves. It is a love born of weakness, however. Parents know, or should know, that children must pass through injury and loss. So must all creatures and things. Some injuries lead to growth; some don't. When our time has come, let us go.

Hoarders feel a fear more pressing than the fear of eventual death, and that is the fear of having no identity now. Young women, blooming, bombarded and anxious, may show their midriffs to a candid world, but they set literal limits on themselves in the form of tattoos and navel rings. The Collyer brothers weren't into belly buttons; their personal border control took the form of stacked newspapers and rotting groceries.

But our real interest in hoarders is our feeling as New Yorkers that we are all like them. Everyone everywhere has too much stuff, but in a city of inhabited stalagmites our stuff is ever present.

My wife and I live in a rent-stabilized two-bedroom apartment. This makes us urban gentry. Our high station entitles us to 850 square feet. How do we, and other New Yorkers, manage?

We put things inside of things, and put those things over or under other things. Our snorkel masks live under the bed. Emily Bronte and Edmund Wilson live over the bathroom door. The SATB edition of Handel's Messiah lives in a floor-level drawer with 12x12" cork tiles and three pairs of shoes. A fan, a VCR monitor, and four emergency candles live on a shelf over our hats and gloves. Laugh if you like, suburbanites. But imagine if everything in your basement, attic, and garage came in the night to your bedroom door like fugitive slaves and said, "Hide me."

After hiding has done its best, we spin off the rest. New Yorkers discovered back offices and outsourcing long before ...