At first appearance the hoard is incredibly disorderly and vaguely disrespectful. Those things might be true in some ways, but underneath this phenomenon is an exquisite tenderness and a perpetual strain towards long term order and control.
The innumerable and varied objects - many of which appear as useless, trivial, and/or junk - accumulate around a terrible trauma, and the accompanying fear of an uncertain future.
Each new object in the stash could "come in handy" someday, or otherwise is imbued with a powerful sentimentality that would be quite painful to break. This is a strange ontological realm in which the vast abundance that the industrial middle class has access to is nevertheless scarce and could be swept away at any moment, never to return again.
To contrast, within a fertile forest, the objects of one's needs are constantly being regenerated, and indeed are striving to reproduce and perpetuate themselves, and lie in a relationship to oneself as a web of mutual support. At least, before winter arrives.
Alas, winter is here for the hoarder all the time. Life is a taught tightrope walk in which one's precious resources are relentlessly squirreled away, as the context that they were generated in is eternally suspect as a cold and hostile vacuum. The only choice is to accumulate whatever one can get one's hands on, and never let those things out of one's sight. The whole sprawling future and all the promise that it brings is compressed and concentrated into the tight space of one's own provincial domain.
