I have had the opportunity to downsize my home twice. I left a very large West End Avenue apartment where I had lived for forty-five years to move into a small apartment in South Brooklyn after my wife died and now I am pruning again to move with my son’s family to a Mountain state, thinking of this as a new adventure for an old man and therefore blessed, even though it is not exactly a great trek in that the national chains of banks and pharmacies have all the same records and so there is not much to change in my life as to commercial matters. What I have found out about pruning is that it is not all that jarring however much I am sentimental. Memories are more real than things. If there is a lesson in this adventure it is, as might be expected given my presumptions, getting rid of things is not like that very vivid scene in “2001” where the file books empty out of HAL’s computer until there is nothing left, his voice getting ever more base and then nothing. Rather, every person parrs down to an essence, which is their consciousness. Spinoza would say it more exactly. The essence is the complexity of a person’s experiences and ideas and that is irreducible and intact so long as the person lives. In that sense, every person, however reduced, has a “free will”, though Spinoza did not use the term as being irrelevant or redundant. What does having “free will” add to saying a person’s consciousness is more or less complex?. Ideas and emotions modify each other and themselves. That’s called “thinking”.
Most people I have known have died in their long time homes. That means that they were surrounded with their belongings: their books, furniture, nicknacks, cutlery, dishes, paintings and everything else. Other people had to sort out what was to be thrown and kept and just about everything goes, even to people who had much admired the deceased. They may keep a favorite vase or painting but not much else. People remark that the deceased had kept together and easily accessed their valuable documents, like wills and bank accounts, so that the deceased was so considerate as to allow people to transfer valuables. Others point out that their household, though intact, had become somewhat shabby and unrepaired, and wanted not for herself to let things fall down. An aunt was angry at me for not having reclaimed two pieces of pottery that they had originally given as a gift to my mother and had not been able to claim them for a long time, but I was fed up with dealing with my mother’s household and sold it all as a lot, hang the little objets, and so my aunt was miffed. Enough was enough.You can’t linger too long on other people's remains. There is a time to move on.
It turned out to be remarkably easy to downscale my first apartment, even of material that was of such long standing. It was indeed a pleasure for me, as still alive, to see some of my favorite paintings and objects taken into their homes by my children rather than being given to people after I had died. Also easy was that most of what I had gotten rid of was furniture. Yes, I had a large dinner table and fancy China to use at large dinner parties and Thanksgiving and Christmas, but there wasn’t any use for them. Anyway, people don't do fancy dinner parties anymore, or at least with the sort of people I know. In fact, it was difficult to get rid of the fancy China even though every couple starting up had as elaborate a set as they could afford. There was also a solid oak desk that I had gotten soon after marrying, but it was just something to reminisce about, and so had no emotional problem unloading it, as well as with sofas and tables and plush chairs, now that my wife was gone and so the place for us to sit together was no longer there. What I brought with me were boxes of old papers and the equivalent of daybooks and financial records and books most of whom were stored in a garage for me to peruse gradually and I might empty one or so every few months or so for the time I lived in my new place, cut down to dishes and cookware and bedding that a bachelor pad needed.
The second pruning required me to get rid of those papers. The tax returns and telephone and banking receipts were easily enough to eliminate, and even felt a bit of relief to have an incentive to eliminate my tendency to hoard old papers. I did keep a photo of my wife in her wedding dress and also some photos of her engaging in polite exchanges at some family ceremonial occasions. I did eliminate, however, the many pictures of the dog who was her pet when my wife was a little girl. I knew her life was important to her, and so I think of that dog as part of her memory and I savor that rather than the dog itself, which I never met, nor the family pictures in California where my wife had lived there in her early years. She didn’t want to look at them again because her childhood was not happy. As my daughter once said, the only faces in the photos of the California family who were happy was that dog. So the lot of those reminiscences were out, my wife and I commencing on our lives only when we had gotten together, the past filled with demons and residues rather than active agents.
The difficult decision was to get rid of my notes and papers, including my duplicates of conference papers and some offprints of articles all of which had accumulated even for a less than middling academic career. I got rid of all but a few duplicates. The key decision was to get rid of an old friend's dissertation and my late wife’s graduate school course notebooks. I realized that I would never reread any of them, especially with the remark I remembered had been made of the course notebooks collected by Professor Kingsfield, a figure in “The Paper Chase”, who was very impressed by one of his students and finds that Kingsfield’s student notes had been ordinary, nothing exceptional. What my wife understood was far more than in her graduate school notes. Most of all, I saw that those records were totems, sacred relics, rather than something I needed. I could feel free to get rid of the paper objects and just remain in my memory, What my friend had said in her dissertation when I read what she had written was less important than the palpable memory of her presence, and the same was true of whatever were the wise and silly things my wife had said to me for over forty years. So my pruning is not just for the purpose of getting rid of space; it is to liberate me from my past, to travel it further only within my memory, which is the essential thing for so long as that memory remains and when it doesn’t remain, it won’t matter anyway, will it?
The trickiest portion to let go are the daybooks--really, the scraps and single sheet papers which have remarks that can be recalled and activated in my mind as a topic that I can still write about, the belief being that ideas remain fresh after forty years so long as they go with fresh examples, ideas in the humanities having very long lifelines. Fifty years hardly exhaust them. People even reinvent social contract theory after, let us say, three hundred and fifty years when we consider nowadays whether a relatively permanent system of entitlements is to be regarded as part of the social contract rather than a temporary expedience. So these wisps of paper are not totems but reminders, like the bits of paper created by Jeremy Bentham so that the young John Stuart Mill might collect and construct his notes into a presentable argument. So I am able to use these scraps of paper as crutches, so as to ease making my still active thoughts. And, anyway, since the scraps are only memory devices, it is alright for many of them got lost in the shuffle. There are enough to be preserved to spark thoughts and, more important, for even entirely new ones to be born. There are still new things to say about politics or a new book of fiction. The arrow always points forward.
A very vexatious issue is which books to keep and which to let go. I had sold thousands of books when I left my long term residence, partly just to get the service to cart it off. Now there are much less but they still make up most of the stuff I will take on my present journey. Why? There is no reason for a volume of Shakespeare in that every play and poem is readily available on the internet. One standard metaphor is that every book is like a friend. Each one has its own consciousness, its personality, and there is something existential about seeing each one of our friends sitting on a bookshelf, as if they were communicating with one another, each in their own particular ways, their idiosyncrasies, their subtleties. That is true enough, but there is something else, which is that there is something totemic about bound books. People had family Bibles if no other books in their homes, whether or not they were read or just added into the flyleaf when a new child was inscribed. Books give us the icons of the hearth. Books, I add, are also about totems of social class. My parents, who weren’t readers, must have obtained before I remembered some books from some salesman. There was a ten volume book of encyclopedias that I recognized early in life to be very inferior. There was also Morris Fishbein’s “Home Medical Advisor”, seen in many not very booked homes, which showed how to applya Bandaid or what to do if having ingested lye, but I most remember reading the section of the book on sex and birth so that I could learn things my parents would have been too embarrassed to discuss. My father also subscribed to “Reader’s Digest”, and he sometimes read parts of an issue. His a bit classier younger brother had “Life” magazine on his coffee table, and I thought that was a considerable uptick in living lavishly. When I was a teenager, I subscribed to “Look” magazine, the cutrate version of “Life”, because that was what I could afford. Books accumulate as measures of one’s accomplishment, and so his first collection of a friend was of all the readings bought from Columbia College for the books on the storied Humanities curriculum: Euripedes and Cervantes and, earlier than when I was an undergraduate, Spinoza, and, much more recently added, Jane Austen. All worthwhile; not a slouch among them. Giving books up is, to the contrary, like getting rid of insignias of enemy aircraft killed on a bomber raid. We are entitled to be ensconced in our permanent dialogues. I have, today, a sense of needing Victor Klemperer's “I Will Bear Witness” and Kershaw’s “Hitler” and half a dozen books on Spinoza. They are my history and will be remembered within my present so long as I am.