dual personalities

“Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.”

― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

Or all of the above, right?

Furthermore, there are plenty of people who read, but do not have books in their home. Books, after all, gather dust and some people never read a book twice, so why would you want to own it? It is just entertainment. But for some of us, books are old friends whom we visit and re-visit.

The world can always be divided in two. You know, between people who collect and people who don’t. People who buy books and people who never buy books. People who buy a house and furnish it and never think of it again and those who are continually feathering their nests.

I spend a lot of time in my nest. Having my things around me (and my mother’s things and her mother’s things and so on) makes me happy. I appreciate them and enjoy them.

This is not to say, I don’t believe whole-heartedly in “editing” and being organized. But I had a friend once who lived like she might have to move out of her house overnight and she wanted to be ready. That meant no extraneous possessions–like last month’s magazines. The minute her son outgrew something, she got rid of it. If he didn’t play with a toy for some designated time, out it went. (This begs another question–Are children allowed to have their own things and should their mother be getting rid of them?) I could not live that way, but to each his own. You do what you have to do.

It is never a good thing to get too attached to our things. They are, after all, just things–not people.

But I always told my children: in case of a fire, someone grab the sampler!

It went without saying that the priority was getting oneself out the door!

The key, of course, is enjoying what you have. Don’t you agree?