The word treasure turns out to be rooted not in the object, but in the act.
Let’s break it down. Treasure comes from the Old French Tresor “treasury, hoard, treasure,” which comes from the Greek Thesauros “store, treasure, treasure house,” which is related to the verb Tithenai “to put” or “to place.” (This comes from the PIE root *dhe , “to set, put.”).
When I think of the word treasure, I think of pirates and gold. I also think of it verbally: I treasure my time writing, I treasure my partner, I treasure the sky in New Mexico. Treasure is something deeply valuable. So how does it come from a verb meaning “to put” or “to place”?
Harkening back to a theme we’ve touched on in a number of Limns posts (temple, sacred), treasure as a concept might start by its separation. We set aside what is valuable. We hide or ‘place’ the gold. I find the image of buried treasure particularly delightful to imagine in this framing–it is as though the value is circular: we put/hide the treasured object, and because it is hidden, it is/becomes treasure. The ceremony around both sides of the object change it.
There’s also something greedy (and self-acknowledgedly so) about treasure. The greed is what leads to the precarity: burying treasure, keeping a hoard in the vaults–the very act of attempting to safe guard it is in a way an admission that the center cannot hold, that one is attempting to make secure or infinite something that is transient and finite. We bury treasure because we are already under attack and intend to return to it. We quest for treasure because we long for life to change in an instant, not realizing that in the moment that we become the possessor, we are not free, but rather tethered to the precarity.
The polarity of the word is perhaps best outlined by the difference between treasure as a noun, and treasure as a verb. The noun, made static, the embodiment of our longing and fears, is a kind of altar to our fragility as humans, to how much we wish for certainty. But as a verb, it is a testament to our superpower, our ability to read meaning and value into people, and acts, and objects, and in so doing, render life into a richer landscape. After all, what we treasure is whatever we value, whatever we imbue with value, and that is a deeply egalitarian act that can never be taken from any of us. We can value our own breath, value our minds, value the crack that the light gets through. I find this an emboldening and deeply relaxing notion. And on the other hand, treasure, calcified into a noun, stands as a warning. It is no accident that we associate it with gold or jewels–these are the physical objects that have most consistently, throughout human history, maintained a universal sense of value. They have almost escaped the arbitrary (after all, why should we value gold or jewels? We can’t eat them, we can’t drink them, we can’t use them for shelter). Their symbolism or positionality as almost true value, almost something certain and infinite, is always a reflection back of our deepest terrors and longings.
So maybe the simple lesson is this: work on the muscle of treasuring, and avoid treasure itself.