Burning the stuff but cherishing the memories
Last week my wife looked around our living room. “I think there are too many stacks of too many books in this room.” Or something like that. I look around the room and see opportunities (or something like that). She looks around the room and sees clutter.
While we disagree about how many books is too many books, we both believe that we need to do more to declutter our lives. We downsized to a much smaller residence a half-dozen years ago, and we would definitely be more at ease in our space if there were fewer objects filling it up.
While she was out of town these last few days I took a pass through my book collection, selecting books (opportunities!) that I’m willing to offer to someone else. I’ve already put several dozen in the donations bin at our local library. I have another dozen or so I’ll be sending off to Thriftbooks as soon as I can find a suitable box. And a third set of several dozen that I’m hoping to sell to one of our neighborhood used bookstores, where I’ll likely get pennies on the dollar. (Thriftbooks isn’t interested in these because they were published before each book had its own ISBN.) When my wife comes home later today, I wonder if she’ll notice that, for the moment at least, there are no stacks of books in the living room. (I hope I’ve not just given away the secret. She looks at this blog rarely enough that I’m willing to take the risk.)
Still, we have more work to do. There are many books on the shelves, in addition to all those other things taking up space. All of these things embody attachments that move beyond the physical objects themselves. They remind us of experiences that we had, experiences that shape who we are and the life that we’ve shared. However, Jenny Erpenbeck now has me thinking differently about these objects and our attachments to them:
Recently, a Russian woman came to visit me. She moved to Germany a year ago with four children. A piano, how lovely! she says as she enters my apartment. Books, how lovely! A few steps farther on, she points to a few of my son’s drawings hanging on the wall and says: Lovely! She adds: It’s lovely to have something like that. At first, I don’t understand what she means; after all, she has four children herself. Well, she says, and smiles, you can’t take it all with you. Sure, sure, I say. So, she says, still smiling, we made a big bonfire, we all sat around it, then we took page after page in our hands, we looked at everything again and remembered who drew this or that, how old she was at the time, we enjoyed it together one last time, and then we burned it all. It was a lovely bonfire, we were singing. I don’t say anything now. You can’t take it all with you, she repeats, and says with a smile: We left with four children and two large suitcases. That was all (Things that Disappear, pp. 67f).
We still have the stuff, even though we know that ultimately we can’t take it with us. I’m thinking, though, that we might benefit from finding a way to cherish the memories even as we abandon the stuff.
