Clutter and Confessions

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to give other people advice? And have you noticed how, while you are doling out the advice, it feels like you are really, really good at doing what you are telling others to do, that you are the best example of someone who adheres to this brilliant practice you are describing, whatever it is? Well, the purpose of advice is to make yourself feel a little more in control of your own life, and also to remind yourself to take your own advice more often. Finally, in small part, it is also to help your friend figure out whatever it is he or she is grappling with.
Well, today I will give some advice on clutter, confess to not taking my own advice, amend that to say that I really do for the most part follow my own advice, and I will show you what I mean with some photos.

First off let me just say, for the record, that i *hate* clutter. Let me say that again: *I hate clutter.* My ideal house looks like this:

• rooms in which there are only one or two pieces of furniture,
• maybe a rug,
• and the walls are covered with bookcases and/or art, or are left bare.

In my ideal house there are:

• no vases,
• no statuettes or figurines,
• no knick-knacks of any kind,
• well, you get the picture.

Inevitably though, life causes me to accumulate stuff. What I am exceptionally good at (and those who know me will confirm this, I’m not making it up) is purging. I throw things away with glee. It is in fact my favorite activity. So when I moved to the new house I took it as the perfect opportunity to throw away half of my possessions. I now see that I should have thrown away three-quarters of my things, or perhaps seven-eighths.

The only thing I have a lot of and care to accumulate more of is *books*. And I’m changing even in that regard. Well, anyway, so I built as many bookcases as I could during the renovation and I filled several of them up very quickly. Then I slipped and did something that can definitely be filed under *not following my own advice*.

I moved to New York from Florence in 1996, and I brought with me only four duffel bags full of my clothes and those of my two small children. Oh, and my guitar. That’s it. I moved continents with four duffel bags, a guitar and two toddlers. What I left behind in the basement of my house, which I had rented, were about 40 boxes of books. I had given away, discarded, left for the tenants all of the furniture. A couple of years later I went back and filled one of the famous duffels with reference books, because I was (and still am) a translator, and having re-established myself as a professional film translator (subtitles in English and Italian for films, tv, documentaries, etc., mostly for DVDs) in a new country, I needed my dictionaries.
Eleven years later those books were still in that basement. So when the sale of the house was finalized and the new owners were moving in, the basement in my new house in Brooklyn was just about ready to receive some stuff. Here’s what I should have done. *Left it all there, told them to burn it, donate it to the Red Cross, WHATEVER*. Here is what I did: *Paid a few thousand dollars to have the whole kit and caboodle shipped to Brooklyn.*
Now these boxes have been shelved — very neatly if I say so myself — in my basement for a whole year. Here’s the thing:

• I don’t actually have enough bookcases to house all my books.
• I will have to weed.
• I am sure that I have bought again certain books that I consider to be staples since I’ve been here in NY.
• I will have to buy/build more bookcases.
• I can’t face it, being depleted and worn out after a year of renovations and a year of settling in.

Why didn’t I leave it all in Italy? Well, here’s the other thing:

• Somewhere in those boxes were the photo albums not only of my children’s infancy but also some photos of my Italian grandmother and other albums of my life in Italy, which now feels like someone else’s life in many ways.
• Though I am not sentimental and I have always felt that I don’t need objects to remind me of the people and places I have loved and continue to love, I no longer really remembered what was in those boxes and I figured it was worth two or three thousand dollars to get some kind of closure on my Italian life.

Here is what the situation looks like:

[minislides]

In the slides above you can see:

• a small pile of boxes which contains what is left to unpack from my previous apartment in Brooklyn. This pile is not very big, the number of boxes is not large, and yet… There it sits for over a year now. I moved into this new house on July 1, 2007. Here we are at the end of October, 2008. Nuff sed!
• one long shelf of books from opposite angles,
• and a close-up of a box clearly from Italy, since it’s labeled “Libri.” Wish me luck!

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Tagged as: Clutter