Friends have encouraged me to downsize for well more than a decade. I’m making progress!
One of my old friends said she “will believe it when I see it” about my downsizing project. That’s a bit of snark I reject and even resent. When someone tries to evolve, make fundamental changes, or reboot, true friends provide love and encouragement rather than sarcasm. Believe me, nobody is more surprised than I am to be taking on this madcap reformation. Friends and advisers have encouraged me to downsize for well more than a decade. A couple of years ago, my daughter and a former employee pleaded with me to give away at least multiple copies of some books — I have 10 copies, probably, of Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage, eight or nine copies of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (in my defense, by several different translators!), multiple editions of Shakespeare (complete and individual plays), my swollen collection of three complete hardbound editions of the novels of Charles Dickens, enough copies of Crime and Punishment to conduct a small seminar, etc. In previous years, at most, I would release (with great petulance) one or maybe two copies of Anna K. or a river-damaged copy of Undaunted Courage.
Whether I can accurately be called a hoarder is an interesting question. I’d like to say no, but I would have to look up “hoarder” in one or more of my 50 dictionaries, including all 13 glorious folio volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), both the Second and the Third editions of Webster’s six-pound unabridged dictionaries, etc., in every direction. I know people today who say, “Why would anyone own a dictionary when all that’s easily available on every laptop computer?” I pity them, as of course they pity me.
One of my close friends, an acclaimed structural engineer, visiting my house a few years ago, where virtually every single wall throughout has floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, stuffed full, said, “I think you might want to rethink some of this. It’s not clear to me that your joists can support all of these books. I think several of your floors might collapse.” I laughed this off, but later used my Compact OED to look up “joists.” Sagging walls, no, but 25,000 books would make for a fire worthy of Nero should the house ever catch on fire. I have considered torching the house as a downsizing strategy, but I’m told the insurance companies are pretty savvy about such things.
Ah, but listen up, ye skeptics. Thus far, in only three weeks, I have culled and boxed more than 30 nifty bank boxes of books, totaling approximately 2,500 books. I won’t say I haven’t made a dent, but since my goal is at least 5,000 books, I’ve got a long way to go, and most of the easy culling will soon be finished: Liberace: The Years of Doubt, A Complete Idiot’s Guide to Sanskrit, Sugar Blues, Freakonomics. So far, downsizing has not put a dent in my sense of self. In fact, just the reverse.
Every evening, as I wind down and survey the undeniable physical evidence of progress, with another set of half a dozen gleaming white bank boxes stacked up in a bibliographical tower, I say out loud, “Holy smoke, I’m really doing this. I’m going to win this battle. I’m feeling more Thoreauvian by the minute!”
Henry David Thoreau argued that the more you have, the more it clogs your soul. He’s right. They’re right. The minimalists are smug, but they are right. Downsizing really is a liberation. It satisfies more than it bites. It vindicates Thoreau’s famous statement. “I learned this much at least by my experiment. If a man advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
In my dream world, I imagine myself as someone like Jefferson, who knew exactly where everything in his world was at any given moment, kept five daily diaries, kept copies of his correspondence in and out, and seemed never to have had an unproductive day. Still, in the real world, I know myself as someone who at 1:30 a.m. is scrounging around the garage for a book I might have left in a backpack or suitcase after last year’s retreat.
My Message if You Want To Change Your Life
Here’s my message to you all. To change your life, you have to:
A: want to change your life, by which I mean really want to change your life;
B: force yourself to start today (not after the holidays) with small measurable steps;
C: surround yourself with encouraging, patient, loving friends;
D: announce your goals publicly (perhaps not THIS publicly) so that you are more likely to persevere and hold yourself accountable;
E: search for useful places to take all that superfluity so that it does not just wind up in the garbage bin;
F: do a little every day, to keep up the momentum.
Truth told, I’m astonished that this process has felt so satisfying. I thought I would be weeping and gnashing my teeth. That may come when I get down to bone and muscle on the bookshelves, but I don’t think it will now. I do believe Thoreau is right when he says that if you put your heart and mind into it, you will actually pass what he calls “an invisible line” into a more responsible, sane, enlightened, and justifiable future.
For the moment, I close with a paraphrase of Winston Churchill. I will not flag or fail. I will fight for downsizing victory in the basement. I will fight in the guest bedroom. I will fight the good fight in the living room, in the office, in my bedroom, in the TV room, in the special Lewis and Clark room, and even in the garage. All I have to offer myself is dust, sweat, tears, and maybe the odd paper cut.
Still, I’m keeping most of the Dickens, most of the Lewis and Clark, all of Renaissance literature, and most of my Jefferson collection.
The only thing that’s holding me back (besides the high cost of bank boxes) is those moments (two or three per day) when I am boxing up books and I discover a book a: I didn’t know I had; b: I haven’t seen for a long while; or c: one that pertains to some current writing project. At that point, I generally sit on the floor with my back up against a bookshelf and read for 20-75 minutes, a lovely guilty pleasure as great as sneaking a cigarette (not one of my weaknesses) or calling in sick to have another day in the North Dakota badlands.
My book collection is only one of my downsizing projects, but it is the one I intend to see to victory first.