We spent several weeks early this summer clearing out a house in France ready for sale. This was a painful process for me, although some people make a virtue out of it. The simplification guru Marie Kondo, in her popular book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” says: “If you don’t need it, or use it, or love it, get rid of it.”
Like most advice books this one ignores human nature. I needed, used and loved almost everything in that house, and I prefer to live with a comforting amount of clutter. Nobody, except perhaps Ms. Kondo, truly believes that the world was intended to be a tidy place. Just look around.
History from time to time throws up these gurus of asceticism who think that we should live like holy hermits in empty boxes. Thoreau famously advised “Simplify. Simplify,” and even lived in a small hut in the woods – but not for long. The Greek philosopher Diogenes was said to have lived in a large ceramic pot with virtually no possessions at all. But he was widely regarded as being mad.
The attempt to purify life by getting rid of material things is a kind of madness. The normal chaos of mental life is just that – normal – and nothing to do with material things. You can be just as crazy in an empty room as in one full of junk, and any billionaire will tell you that the more stuff you have the happier you become.
Among the many things Ms. Kondo tells us to get rid of are books, once we've read them, or may never read them. But I have many, many books that I may want to read again, and an unread book is full of potential, like a lottery ticket. In fact I don’t know which I value more, the books I haven’t read or the books I have.
My study at home is a masterpiece of clutter. I think of leaving it to a museum, complete with all the out-of-date files, unread books, empty pens, dead plants, and obsolete computers that make it feel so much like home. I like to think of it as a creative space, although my wife has other names for it. I’m a great believer in the old adage that an empty desk equals an empty mind. The fictional Sherlock Holmes was notoriously messy, as was the real Albert Einstein. They both found better things to do with their brains than tidying up.
We were simplifying the house in France for a new owner, because nobody wants to inherit somebody else’s clutter – they prefer to create their own. The new owner is an artist and will soon restore a proper degree of artistic disorder. Clutter cannot be denied. Like mice or cellulite it always comes back.
Clutter is a sign of life. We’ve all been spooked by those immaculate senior citizen condos. Their perfection seems like a kind of surrender, an admission that there’s nothing left to do in life but to make things tidy. A house or apartment is nothing but a box, until we make it into a home with all our unnecessary junk. “Pour your time and passion into what brings you the most joy,” advises Ms. Kondo. In my case, I think, that would be junk.
Copyright: David Bouchier
