I bought Marie Kondo’s first book on The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up right after it came out. It had an enchantingly simple take on clutter: Hold the object, and if it doesn’t spark joy, bless it and send it out the door. Someone, somewhere, will probably find the joy in the whatever-it-was.
Well, yes and no. I couldn’t see myself spending a lot of time arguing with the Joy Gods about winter sox, my mother’s wedding china (the fragile gold swans demand to be washed by hand, so impractical), or our library. When Ms Kondo tells you to haul every book off the shelf, intending you to tap its cover to wake it up and then hold it to your heart to see if you still love it enough to keep it, she’s overlooking a rather essential point to owning books (at least to true booklovers — I can’t speak for people who just tolerate books in their houses). We keep them so we build libraries.
I’m not talking about our very own Carnegie Library. (Although I would love to live in a town that has a Carnegie library and build my own Little Free Library in the same style. Not that I’m a woodworker, but I could take a book out of the library and learn how to build one…)
We build libraries of our minds, our intellect, our passions for knowledge. Libraries of our hearts, the volumes that know us better than our spouses or our childhood teddy bears. Libraries of spirit, whether that’s a place of peace and reflection or adventure and daring.
Obviously, I am in the same camp as Ron Charles, whose article (“Keep your tidy, spark-joy hands off my books“, perfectly describes my view of the matter.
We don’t keep books because we know “what kind of information is important to us at this moment.” We keep them because we don’t know. So take your tidy, magic hands off my piles, if you please. That great jumble of fond memories, intellectual challenges and future delights doesn’t just spark, it warms the whole house.
Ron Charles, The Washington Post, 1/10/2019
This is relevant to me today for two reasons.
First, I have 106 paperback mysteries, detective stories, police procedurals, Regency romances and spy thrillers on my hands. They were meant to be my mother’s revolving library of favourite books, cycling in and out of the small bookcase in the adult family home where she now lives.
Alas, two strokes have robbed her of the ability to follow a full-length novel, or even a story that runs more than four pages in The Atlantic. For my part, any mystery more complex than a Lord Peter Wimsey gives me nightmares these days. And so these once-loved volumes are superfluous to our needs.
I’ve advertised to friends and colleagues. If no one comes to collect them by March 1, off they’ll go (with the bookcase they rode in on) to our friendly local senior center.
The second reason is more complex. I have set myself the February frog of wading through Timothy’s office, and there are books of every stripe in there. They sparked joy for him. Will they spark joy for me? Or guilt? Or impatience? Or puzzlement? Stay tuned…