“Man Trapped Under Mountain of Junk in New York Apartment” shouts a New York news story deeply disturbing to that portion of the population that have ever been called pack rats. According to news accounts, “Patrice Moore, 43, said he called for help when the mountain of mail, books and other paper items collapsed on him Saturday. However no one heard him.”

Well, I heard him — and I can hear him now, as can anyone else who’s ever clipped, torn and tucked away a news story too compelling to toss out with the trash. What Patrice was saying from beneath his paper prison can’t be muffled by all the smirky stories about a slob nearly crushed by back issues of TV Guide: News is the world’s way of trying to tell us something — and Patrice Moore was trying to listen.

I know how that feels. I know newspapers are the “first rough draft of history,” and I’m supposed to set them out at the curb and wait for the hardcover to come out, but I can’t. I like to clip and save, and occasionally to savor a taste of what it was like “back then.” My copy of Life Magazine from Feb. 27, 1950, for instance — around here somewhere, if I can find it — is good for hours of intellectually nourishing mind-snacks on America that week. Take the breathless story about Stalin and Mao’s Valentine’s Day treaty of cooperation (Better Red, get it?). Or the Cold War Era illustration on Page 81, the picture of a city on the bulls-eye of an atomic bomb, mapping its radius of destruction — or is it a dirty bomb, clipped from last week’s news? For this kind of edifying retrieval work I receive not thanks, but the opprobrium of friends and family who venture to the verge of my paper-strewn office to cluck-cluck at the paper chaos within.

So when I read about Moore, rather than joining the clean-desked herd happy to assume he was a demented slob, I wonder about the role he was playing as an urban archaeologist — keeping a paper-trail of the American Zeitgeist, each parchment layer, like the snow atop the polar icecaps, preserving a slice of time long forgotten.

No such thought crosses the minds of the fastidious reporters who file their story on Moore’s fate. As for their sense of history, they note that “the incident recalls the legendary case of the Collyer brothers, who in 1947 were discovered dead in their house in Harlem after one of the brothers was found trapped under a pile of papers and the other died of starvation.” Sure, that’s a bad bit of luck, but it’s worth noting that — given today’s market for collectibles — a single stack of the stuff that crushed the Collyers back then would probably pay a year’s college tuition today. A room full of it would warrant a new Smithsonian Exhibit.

We need to bring that perspective to the stories of Moore’s mishap, to steel ourselves against the smug slant evident when reports tell us that emergency workers, neighbors and about 20 firefighters dug through “the debris” to reach him, “filling 50 garbage bags with paper.” When Moore revives and regains his strength, here’s hoping he asks what happened to his stuff. After all, there might have been something he needed in those 50 bags.

Of course readers at this harried holiday time will be tempted to put a story like Moore’s out of their minds, like yesterday’s news. Instead, we ought to file it away, as a reminder of the price some pay for acting as guardians of our history — like I will the story about the paper mountain that fell on poor Patrice Moore. As soon as I find my scissors.

Daniel McGroarty, a former White House speechwriter, now is affiliated with White House Writers Group, 1030 15th Street NW, 11th Floor, Washington, D.C. 20005.