I own a total of nine Bob Dylan albums, plus the five Bootleg Series ones. Do I regret buying any of them? No. Have I enjoyed listening to all of them? Definately. Would I have enjoyed another album more than, for example, Oh Mercy (which, despite probably being the best album between Blood On The Tracks and Love And Theft, is not a true classic by any metric)? Maybe. But that’s not really the point, is it?

Am I just being completist, and is that completism spoiling my potential enjoyment and enrichment? Occasionally I suspect that might be the case, and one certainly needs to be vigilant about this. But there’s more to it than that.

Experiencing a body of work and knowing the biographical connections between individual pieces allows a better and broader appreciation than simply engaging with them in isolation would.

(I don’t like using ‘experience’ in this context, because it makes the activity seem overly passive, wheras in reality it’s active and engaged. The problem is that I can’t talk about ‘reading’ or ‘watching’, because I’m trying to make a general argument… If you think of a better word, mention it in the comments!)

Making connections between things is a very human activity. The world is like a jigsaw puzzle: appreciating the pieces for what they are isn’t enough, real understanding (and satisfaction) only comes from putting them together in the correct arrangement. Seeing the links between one piece of work and another leads us to a fuller, deeper, more meaningful comprehension of the things themselves, and authorship is vital data in making these connections.

It’s more, though, than just building up a picture of the world. Authorship is a more vital relation than, for example, the year something was made (although that, too, has importance). Art is made by artists—by people. Reading many books by the same author is, perhaps, the closest we can come to seeing the world through another’s eyes. Layer on layer, we build up an understanding of how the world feels to someone, not directly—for authorship is artifice, creation, misdirection—but through a roundabout process of extrapolation, of slowly, tenuously grasping not views or opinions but a more basic experiential understanding.