The Clutter of Life

When you start getting told that you need to throw out your books, then you know that this 'de-cluttering' nonsense has gone too far.  It is, surely, the ultimate act of philistinism to simply erase one's entire reading history in the name of that dubious belief that a tidy home (or desk) is the sign of a tidy mind.  I have shelves of old books all over my house and rarely part with any of them.  They aren't mere possessions, they are part of who I am, chronicling my changing tastes in reading matter and the waxing and waning of various interests.  They are a repository of accumulated knowledge, there to be consulted when needed, (and they give far more information, in a far more convenient form, than any Wikipedia entry).  But it goes beyond that - I love their physical presence: the way they feel, the way they smell, (older paperbacks have such a distinctive smell), their often wonderful cover art.  And you know something - I even reread them.  Last Summer, for instance, I selected some old paperback novels at random from my shelves to reread - it was a fascinating experience. It is surprising how little one remembers of the details of even the novels you most enjoyed.  One of the paperbacks I reread I couldn't remember a thing about beyond the second chapter - I was also struck by how dated it now felt, (it was published twenty years ago) - nobody had a mobile phone, let alone a home computer and the internet wasn't even dreamed of.

But to get back to the point - this decluttering nonsense.  It is part of this increasing trend in the media to tell us that our houses should look like show homes: neat and pristine, as if they have never been lived in.  When I was a child, things were very different: peoples' houses were chock full of what would now be dismissed as 'clutter', but what we then recognised as a lifetime's accumulation of 'stuff', which reflected our lives and character.  It personalised our environments and made our houses into homes: the places we lived in.  Nowadays, though, such homes would be arrogantly condemned as being 'untidy'.  But, as alluded to earlier, this obsession also applies to the workplace, where 'tidiness' is erroneously equated with 'efficiency'.  The reality is that workplace 'tidiness' is actually designed to impose conformity upon the workforce, to completely depersonalise it and, by extension, those who work in it.  Anything which might link it to the outside world is branded as being 'untidy', or 'clutter'. As for the idea that a 'tidy' environment equates to a 'tidy' mind: utter bullshit.  Apparently chaotic environments (although they are only 'chaotic' to outsiders, the 'chaos' merely represents a different form of organisation), often reflect a creative mind.  It often also reflects the fact that someone simply prioritises actually getting on with the job in hand rather than wasting time on lining all their pencils up. Besides, these so called 'tidy' minds are, in my experience, more often than not, actually sterile minds producing no innovative or original thoughts and having no flexibility in their thought processes: things must be done one way and one way only and that's the 'tidy' way.  Give me the cluttered life and mind any day.