So last week we found ourselves renting an AirBNB room in an elderly three story house in Ithaca, NY owned by a couple in their 30s. Other inhabitants included a pair of large painted turtles in an indoor pond and a white bull terrier sporting a dark grey waistcoat snoozing on the couch in front of the fireplace. A windup Victrola stood to one side of the room, waiting to be fed from a couple of wooden boxes crammed with 78s. Alexis welcomed us with an easy smile and gave us short tour of the amenities.

All of the above would have been easily enough to make me feel completely comfortable and happy to be there. But as I scanned the room, trying to pick up details and clues about the lives and interests of the owners, I pretty much fell into a huge bookcase taking up most of one side of the room. It’s the kind of a bookcase you can’t take in standing in just one place. You have to walk back and forth, bending way over to the floor and standing on you tiptoes. You can feel the sheer physical presence of the books, probably 700-800 pounds of them.

Real books tucked shoulder to shoulder in a stack of wooden cubes 7 feet tall and more than 12 feet wide. Hundreds of books shelved with slight but not obsessive order, the kind of arrangement that leads to lucky accidents of co-location, such as the Collected Writings of Carl Jung sandwiched between Katz’ The Art of Fermentation and I Like You by Amy Sedaris.

There’s a thrill and an art in trying to divine a person’s life story from the books they keep in their cases. The condition of the books says a lot, but the clusters of topic and genre, the range of publication dates, and even the placement on the shelves speaks…well…volumes. For example, abandoned interests and hobbies usually drift down and to the side.

But that’s not what I was doing here. I was finding dozens and dozens of titles from my own library in a stranger’s bookcase in Ithaca. There are obvious reasons for that, of course. People of similar sensibilities do travel parallel paths. Still the sense that a bit of this house literally overlapped with my own house through the bookcases gave me a spooky through-the-wardrobe sort of a feeling.

Pablo Neruda, Vonnegut, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Charles Bukowski, Philip K. Dick, A History of God by Karen Armstrong, to name only a few.

Books I read many years ago, remembered fondly but will probably never read again, books I’ve been reading but not finished, books on my list to read, books I own, haven’t read, won’t ever read, but for one reason or another can’t bring myself to get rid of.

The next morning Mark and Alexis gave us a kombucha “mother” so I could begin brewing my own, and the address of a guy in Syracuse who fixes broken Victrola springs, the malady that afflicts our own family Victrola.

I’ve been away from my own bookcase in our house in NH for almost five months. Such a pleasure of connection and commonality to find a portion of that bookcase in an Ithaca living room.

They were the pioneers of conspicuous consumption, carting all that stuff back home to older houses which were designed to hold a few essential items discreetly in cupboards or closets or shelves. So the Victorians invented extravagant, exquisite clutter as interior design. An empty space on a table or shelf, a lampshade without tassels, a table leg without ornamentation, any place the weary eye could rest without being assaulted was anathema. Millions of manufactured things had broken loose into the world and claimed their places crowded into every room of every house whose owners could afford them.

During the final decades of the 19th century, quite suddenly most of the middle and upper classes on earth could, and did, acquire way, way more stuff than they needed or could actually claim to use. Before the industrial revolution human beings essentially had to make their things by hand, and so the number of hands at work placed a limit on how many widgets in a day or a year those hands could make. But machinery changed that formula forever, and there we were, millions and millions of people who for tens of thousands of years had always wanted more stuff, standing in front of the factory doors with lust for things in our guts and extra money in our hands as wave after wave of objects washed by us and around us and swept us away into the future.

Regardless of the Victorian era’s celebration of exquisite clutter, the twentieth century would continue to churn out stuff at a rate that was nothing short of relentless, if not remorseless.

And as if enough were not enough, in the past 20 years we’ve figured out how to beam up the real world of things into the digital world of virtual things. Stuff that is orders of magnitude easier to get and have and hold and store than was possible in the physical world now clutters and clogs hard drives, flash memory and server farms. If there is any difference between physical and digital clutter it may be in retrieval: it’s easier and easier to find the needle in the digital haystack with a keystroke.

I know I’m dealing with the curse of clutter when I’ve lost something to it. When I am actually needing some thing but cannot find it. Something useful, some tool, some bit of information on a piece of paper which, because I failed to put it where it goes, fell from grace and into clutter.

The verb “to clutter” now in our time comes true to its original meaning in 14th century English, “to heap up in piles, to litter”, or simply, “to clot”. Clutter does form clots; wherever it comes to rest, it finds its own, and binds together. In drawers, on shelves, in boxes, in closets, on horizontal surfaces, desks and tables and bureaus and ultimately on floors. But the clotting nature of clutter is not limited to physical objects. I am pestered and bedeviled and suffocated and confused as much by the clutter of ideas, fragments of information, memes, responsibilities, lists, lusts, fears and stalled projects in my head as by the thousand thousand objects to which I am attached by ownership, nostalgia or simple neglect. Continue reading A Thousand Thousand Things: Thrashing towards clarity →