What Do I Own?

You can buy a star of your own from NASA for as little as $39.40, though bright stars cost more than dim ones, and a binary will go for as much as $69.90. Compare that to the current cost of one square foot of real estate in midtown Manhattan – $1,153 right now – and you will see what a bargain these stars are, especially since the NASA website tells us that your certificate of ownership will come with “fast shipping.” Not the star itself of course. And naturally, after I receive my certificate of ownership I no more own that pinprick of light than I ever did, it’s just a cute fundraising pitch. If I go up to the roof the next night and look up into the night sky I will probably be hard put to even locate my property, while the star itself will remain quite impassive about the whole affair.

 Now let’s imagine that I, as a New Yorker, buy a hundred acres of woodland in somewhere out West. It fulfills my dream of having my own patch of dirt on this Earth, and I certainly plan to make it somewhere special for me, maybe even build a structure there some day. But life is busy, I never get around to even visiting, and eventually I get so old it will not be convenient to go there at all. But it is still mine, and I may sell it one day, hopefully at a profit.

 Is the unvisited woodland any different to the star? To what degree can I say that it is functionally mine? Maybe I feel like it helps if I hire some local to put Keep Out signs and No Hunting signs around it, but the squirrels and the birds there will never see the top of my head as I walk through it, and not a drop of my sweat will fall on its soil. The land, like the star, will know nothing of me, not in any way you could ever permutate the word “knowing.”

 And so, in the same way, if I went to the store and bought a shirt, and then kept it, still in its wrapping, in my closet, am I really the owner? I may have the sales receipt, just as I have the certificate of ownership of the star, but as with the star, what I actually own is the piece of paper – until I get into relationship with the shirt by putting it on. I could buy myself a hundred shirts, just like I bought a hundred acres out West, but how much do I own any of them?

 You might say that a shirt, like a woodland, a bird, or a star, has a soul, and when our souls have intertwined, we contain each other, and then we could talk of ownership. If I have fallen in love in this shirt, been fired from a job in it, got drunk with a friend in it, seen my child born while wearing it; if it fades over the years, takes on some repairs, is never quite the same again, why then our souls have truly intertwined. The shirt is mine, just as a cat of many years is mine, and I truly, deeply, madly, belong to the cat. The unworn shirt, the distant hundred-acre wood, the star, however, have no history with me, they occupy no space that I have occupied, and our souls have not comingled.

 I can even ask the same question of my arm. That surely must be mine! But only to the extent that, like the shirt that covers it, we have comingled. I would miss my arm if ever it were gone, but that suggests there is a separate me to miss this arm, and the me who misses it must be more essential to myself than the arm, beloved as it is. Even my own arm perhaps, is a woodland I must walk in many times, with much care, attention, and interest, before we can say we own each other. We must suffer and love together and remember that each other is there.

 This ownership thing then, is very tricky. Bits of paper denote ownership according to the state, but not to the soul, and for the soul we can only own but so much, because we don’t have endless attention. If I own more than a few shirts my attention flags, and too many new shirts are simply tiring and hurtful. While in my folly I might aspire to own lots and lots of things that really are owned by the shelves they came from, my real capacity for ownership shrinks and rises with the seasons of the soul. With fewer things and more attentiveness, I may give myself a chance to do ownership. Who knows, one day I may become a homeowner, if I could just encompass the place. One day, having worn it through rain and shine, I mean even own my own soul.