It’s obsessive, no doubt. For more than thirty years, I have been saving the playbills of every theatrical show I have seen, the programs of every concert I have heard, and the flyers from each museum I have entered.

That amounts to a whole lot of stuff by now. Two boxes, crammed to the top, hold all this paper. For old time’s sake, I recently fetched this material down from our attic and perused each document.

If your memory is as bad as mine, you can appreciate what it means to have these mementoes. Otherwise I would have plumb forgotten the great majority of the artistic events that, even when they gave me intense pleasure, faded from my recollection distressingly fast.

Fortunately, it takes only a moment to bring back images of some performances and displays. Sometimes I can even find the notes that I wrote about the event. That adds to the fun of remembering where I was and, often, with whom.

In this sea of artistic events, two promontories stand out above all the rest.

The first dates from 1975 when I went to the Wilbur Theater in Boston to see a play called “Brief Lives.” Daniel, a friend who was visiting at the time, came with me to this matinee. He had no idea what we would be seeing, and I had only vague expectations.

What we beheld that afternoon proved to be the finest one-man theatrical production I ever expect to see. The magnificent British actor Roy Dotrice brought to life the memoirs of an eccentric 17th century diarist named John Aubrey.

The actor, made up to look like an incredibly sloppy old man at age 71, first appears asleep in his four-poster bed, behind curtains. Awakening, he begins to regale us with his life experiences, his acerbic comments about other people, and his philosophy of life.

After the performance, I bought an LP recording of the play, so that I could still listen to its marvelous soliloquies. Much of Aubrey’s humor was bawdy, a fact that added to the enjoyment of the afternoon. It takes forbearance not to quote here from his earthy anecdotes.

What added even more was the theatrical set. Never before or since have I seen such a marvelously detailed framework for a play. In itself it was a work of art. It recreated the room where Aubrey lived, with hundreds of books piled on shelves, faded tapestries on the wall, and the remnants of recent meals strewn around. It was marvelously messy, just the setting for a character who loved living in distinguished squalor.

My friend and I walked away from this performance buoyed up in a way only fine art can do. We had seen a great actor whose work brought us back into a different time and place, and our imagination and emotions had been enlivened by the experience.

The other occasion that has stayed with me vividly was in a different realm ─ music. In 1992, on a visit to London, my sister Carol and I went to St. Paul’s Cathedral for a performance of Elgar’s “Dream of Gerontius.”

This oratorio has been a favorite of mine since adolescence when I first heard it performed in Boston. One prominent critic calls it the greatest piece of religious music between Verdi’s “Requiem” and Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms.”

On this occasion, the grand setting of the famous cathedral proved an ideal setting for this deeply religious work. The church’s soaring interior graced the event as the composer introduced us to a dying man who prepares to face God’s favorable but awe-provoking judgment.

The three singers who accompanied the orchestra performed beautifully; they and the chorus made us feel the kind of spiritual uplift that great art can provide. I have listened to the work many times since, never without being moved. Already, I am looking forward to another performance by the Boston Symphony in January.

These two instances of pleasure in art, culled from a pile of hundreds, can stand for a lifetime of experiences worth remembering. Whenever I choose to look at these old programs, I can feel again something of the joy I felt first long ago.

By people better balanced than I, the obsessive collection of documents will be judged compulsive. But, for me, the practice counts as one way of building a life. Almost everybody finds that true of photos. The playbills I save provide a similar record of influences that have had an appreciable impact on a lifetime.

The experiences that move you or lend meaning or extend the limits of life, ─ these are worth saving. Even if some of the stuff you preserve proves ephemeral and should be thrown away for the sake of your mental health, some other things deserve to be kept because they help define who you are.

Richard Griffin