stuff
I have been in a slow process of selling and giving away everything I own…It started a couple of years ago. It was in response to going to these Golden Globe type events and they just give you stuff. You don’t want it. You don’t use it. And then Mad Men started to become a success on a popular level and people started sending me stuff, just boxes of shit. Gifts for every holiday, clothes. One day, I looked around and thought “I don’t want this stuff, I didn’t ask for it.” So I started giving it to friends or charity stores, or if it is still in its box I might sell it for a hundred bucks. I liked it so I didn’t stop.
“The Observer,” by Tim Adams, in The Guardian, Sunday, April 25, 2010.
We moved today to 415 Central Park West. Enormous business of packing and unpacking my books, which I have been carrying on my back for so many years. Lord, how I would like to get free of all these things sometime. I date my maturity from the day I realized there were books I could get along without.
November 18, 1948 entry in Alfred Kazin’s Journals, selected and edited by Richard M. Cook (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2011), 124.
Let’s understand that things are thieves of time because the more things you have, the more time you have to spend working to pay for them, the more your life is chained to a rhythm of perpetual purchase.
The 11th Hour, produced and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio; directed by Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen; released August 2007.
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.
I am doing it right over again. I am sick of clothes and gewgaws and bags and advertisements and newspaper clippings and society pages and the new Vogue and fittings and the main floors of department stores and the radio—jazz and magazines and hairdressers. I am sick sick to death of them. But I clutch at them madly, like smoking or drinking—anything to keep from thinking.
Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 15.