materialism
Being alive is so extraordinary I don’t know why people limit it to riches, pride, security—all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can’t see anything from a car. It’s moving too fast. People take vacations. That’s their reward—the vacation. Why not the life?
“Jack Gilbert, The Art of Poetry No. 91,” interviewed by Ted Widmer, in Issue 175 of The Paris Review, Fall/Winter 2005.
Wabi-sabi acknowledges that just as it is important to know when to make choices, it is also important to know when not to make choices: to let things be. Even at the most austere level of material existence, we still live in a world of things. Wabi-sabi is exactly about the delicate balance between the pleasure we get from things and the pleasure we get from freedom from things.
Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets, and Philosophers (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1994), 59.
For some weeks now I have been engaged in dispersing the contents of this apartment, trying to persuade hundreds of inanimate objects to scatter and leave me alone. It is not a simple matter. I am impressed by the reluctance of one’s worldly goods to go out again into the world.
“Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street,” in Essays of E. B. White (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 3.
A home is like a reservoir equipped with a check valve: the valve permits influx but prevents outflow. Acquisition goes on night and day—smoothly, subtly, imperceptibly. I have no sharp taste for acquiring things, but it is not necessary to desire things in order to acquire them.
“Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street,” in Essays of E. B. White (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 4.
I’m not somebody who likes to possess. I’m not the person who has six hundred suits. I want to have two suits. Actually, I want to have one suit, and I replace it.
“Just Have Less: Bottega Veneta’s Tomas Maier,” by John Colapinto, The New Yorker, January 3, 2011, 34.
Every single thing you see is future trash. Everything.
Interview in The Believer, September 2010.
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dial Press, 2005) 49.