[ed. When I decluttered a few years ago (over 90 percent of my stuff), books were the hardest things to let go... not clothes, or kitchenware, recreational equipment, art, cds, old ratty furniture... Books. 20+ boxes of them.]
Paring down one’s wardrobe is one thing, but what kind of degenerate only wants to own 30 books (or fewer) at a time on purpose? What sort of psychopath rips out pages from their favorite books and throws away the rest so they can, as Kondo puts it, “keep only the words they like?” For those of us for whom even the word “book” sparks joy, this constitutes a serious disconnect. Still, as the weather gets warmer, many readers will tackle their spring cleaning with The Life-Changing Magic in hand.
I wondered, can Kondo’s Spartan methods be adapted for someone who feels about books the way the National Rifle Association feels about guns, invoking the phrase “cold dead hands”? I decided to give it a try. (...)
The most interesting aspect of the KonMari Method is the way in which it acknowledges the emotional lives of things. Whether that life is inherent or something that we project doesn’t really matter. She bypasses New Age-y concepts like “good vibes” and “energy flow” and jumps right to the chase: the objects you possess have feelings, so deal with it. It may seem silly at first to thank an old sweater for a job well done before getting rid of it, but actually doing so can feel oddly poignant. Kondo’s background in Shintoism is important in this respect. In Shinto cosmology, our physical reality co-exists with an invisible world of animistic spirits. Her worldview is in line with the Japanese aesthetic known in the West as wabi sabi, which explores the delicate balance between the pleasure we get from things versus the pleasure we get from the freedom from things.
The aim of KonMari is to more fully appreciate what you have by letting go of that which no longer serves you. The difficulty comes in telling which is which. Much of what we don’t need tends to blend in with its surroundings, like a camouflaging octopus on a reef, effectively invisible until we grab hold of it or get right up in its face. By handling everything, we cause this hidden dead weight to startle, blanche, and show itself. Kondo even recommends clapping one’s hands over the objects to “wake them up.”
I went through my books one by one. Kondo says you shouldn’t open the books, but I broke that rule—not to read them, but to see what I might have long-ago stashed inside.
There was a surprising amount of stuff between the pages—letters, tickets, photographs, receipts. I found my New Year’s Eve resolutions for 1998; a slip of paper acknowledging my plea of GUILTY to a speeding ticket and instructing me to pay $125 to the town of Athens, New York; a hospital bill for $564; a Xeroxed page from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself with the stanza circled that begins I have said that the soul is not more than the body; the muted floral wrapper for fig apricot soap, still fragrant; the boarding pass for a flight from New York to Stockholm; a yellow hall pass from my California high school.
It occurred to me that part of the reason why tackling the “books” stage of the Full Kondo seems so daunting is that to many of us our books don’t really belong in the category she has assigned. They are not impersonal units of knowledge, interchangeable and replaceable, but rather receptacles for the moments of our lives, whose pages have sopped up morning hopes and late-night sorrows, carried in honeymoon suitcases or clutched to broken hearts. They are mementos, which she cautions readers not to even attempt to contemplate getting rid of until the very last.
by Summer Brennan, Literary Hub | Read more:
Image: uncredited
