I say, “To hell with it!”

 

I call this cozy and inviting.

To hell with minimalism, I'm saying. You can have it. Just be sure it's what you want.

 

Books and websites selling “the new minimalism,” often simply called “decluttering” and “simplifying,” like to tell us we can’t buy happiness. Let’s think about that. Okay. You can’t buy happiness, neither can I, but — think about this with me, please — I believe it's possible to throw happiness away and regret it later.

These things speak to me daily.

Follow the link here and look at the top image on this internet site. If that looks like a cozy, restful, snug and happy refuge from the world to you, read no further in my post today. On the other hand, if you are an inveterate hoarder — that’s another whole ball of wax — then you should go back to that link and follow the steps to clean up your act, because no one wants to have friends or family members living in absolute squalor. Hoarding is a sickness. Heal thyself!

 

Coming back from my digression, though, don’t we all know that hoarding vs. minimalism is a false dilemma? Collecting is not hoarding. And while most of us, I’m guessing, are not serious, committed collectors, with homes that could be mistaken for museums, neither are our homes junkyards, simply because we prefer more visual stimulation and activity than minimalism offers. 

Colorful tins, that's all.

Found objects

Little things

I bought him the box; he bought me the cow.

As for me, I look at bare, minimalist-“decorated” rooms and wonder if lives are being lived there at all. As I have written before on this blog, the Artist and I together were never minimalists. Our life together was rich, although that life, as well as the one I have now, could well be called a simple life. “Too many books”? To me, that sounds like “too much art,” i.e., an oxymoron of the first order. 

Yes to books!

Yes to art!

When my sisters and I had to clear out our mother’s house, we did think she had “too many clothes,” it's true, but none of us were sorry she had kept boxes of photographs, letters, and other personal mementoes, some of which we had never seen before. I wrote about that and about how much it meant to see a scrapbook my mother had started back when she and our father had their first date. 

 

I have saved old letters myself, and along with several albums of photographs I also have piles of loose photos, as did the Artist – and I am keeping all of his, along with my own. He loved his memories, and I love mine, and we shared many wonderful years. Why would I “declutter” my life by throwing out reminders of happiness when I can, through those reminders, re-live more youthful times, our years together, as well as years before we met? 

A little messy but full of life!

Paintings, prints, and photographs on the wall; books on the shelves; a beautiful, “useless” vase; perfectly shaped bowls; little collections of tins and boxes; a row of cowboy boots here and hats hung there; even the ubiquitous scattering of stones on a windowsill that all northern Michigan people seem to have (is that “in our DNA,” as people are so fond of saying nowadays?) – my surroundings are brimming with associations that tell me in a thousand ways of the richness of my life. 

Mine (need polishing)

His --

“Declutter”? You first! What happiness is left to me, I will not be so foolish as to throw away, and I can imagine people today falling for the minimalism fad and wondering on some tomorrow years from now whatever possessed them. “I’d give anything if only I still had my mother’s high school ring ... my father's letters ... that sketchbook from our trip to Paris!” 

Obligatory photo of Sunny Juliet!

What Constitutes 'Simplicity'?

Misleading minimalist photograph from our front porch

Recently I read an article in the New Yorker magazine about minimalism as it relates to living spaces ["Simple Plans," by Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker, February 3, 2020], in which the author describes a video featuring a $60M mansion as "a stark, blank, monochromatic palace...." Readers are not informed of the square footage of the mansion, but I'm guessing the effect was as much in its size as in its minimal furnishings. I would be more impressed by a "minimalist" lifestyle if the homeowners had built themselves a one-room cabin by hand.

 

The Artist and I don’t live with bare walls and have no desire to do so. Walls, in our life, are for displaying art and for accommodating bookshelves. Besides paintings, prints, and books, we have our other little béguins matériels, if I may use that phrase to indicate things we fall for and impulsively must have but don’t need at all. For me, it’s bed linens, kitchen linens, specialty cookware, and what the Artist calls “kitten dishes.” For him, it’s boats (all kinds), leather bags, shoes and boots. And both of us have a thing for attractive boxes of all kinds. So no, we are not minimalists.

 

(Try this – or don’t: do an online search for ‘declutter’ and tell me how many times it took for the word to become a cluttering brain worm. Declutter, declutter, declutter….)

 

But although our life is not minimal, I would argue (mildly, gently) that it can be called simple. Not jet-setters or high-rollers, we don’t buy what we can’t afford, buy very sparingly of the new, and don’t gamble more than a couple dollars (literally) a year (scratch-off lottery tickets). We are possessed of nothing like a wine cellar, and the tiny little Paris kitchen in our old farmhouse does not even boast a dishwasher. Central air conditioning? Are you kidding? An old oscillating fan on the front porch and a tiny one in our bedroom window are all we ever need to get through a Michigan summer. 

 

Minimalism does not necessarily equal simplicity. And there are ways in which a so-called minimalist lifestyle may not even be as simple as it looks on the surface. 

 

One recent morning a man walked into my bookstore looking for a specific title – which is always a long shot, but as it happened that day I had in stock the book he had read years ago as a boy and wanted to read again. It was an out-of-print Michigan title, signed by the author, and while he had no reluctance to pay my $22 price, he surprised me by asking if I wanted him to mail the book back to me after he’d read it so I could “sell it again.” That was a new one! “I don’t like stuff,” he explained. And then he told me (this takes my breath away!) that if he wanted to “keep” a book, rather than pass it along to a friend when he finished reading it, he would take a saw, cut off the binding, and scan the pages! I begged him not to saw up the book he had just bought, and he said he wouldn’t, so it may come back to me, or he may pass it along to a friend. 

 

…He doesn’t like stuff. 

 

While not denying that they are material objects (and I love that about them), I’ve never considered books to be stuff. What I was mulling over in his wake, however, was not books as beloved or even sacred objects but the issue of human-readable vs. machine-readable text. In my simple home life, all I have to do to read one of my books, regardless of its age, is to take it in my hands and open it. At night I may need a lamp (or a couple candles if the power is out), but my daytime reading is completely grid-independent. And my book-reading requires no special digital storage or retrieval technology. I don’t need to worry that the “technology” of my printed books will be outdated during my lifetime, the content become inaccessible. Keeping my books comfortable and healthy adds no layer of complexity, either: if we are comfortable, they are comfortable.

The Artist once made a memorable statement about the way we live. “We can’t be trusted with horizontal surfaces,” he observed. True enough! Tables, counters, chairs, and couches all make themselves readily available as temporary storage for (among other things) slippy-sliding stacks of books, magazines, and mail. The minimalist mind would quail at the sight! And yet the solution, employed whenever one of us gets the urge, requires no cords or batteries.

 

What does ‘the simple life’ mean to you? Do you admire it? Are you living it? Is ‘clutter’ your nemesis or your comfort? Do I protest too much?

A bowl of apples: the simple life!