Maybe you're this kind of person: For three months, you tried to cull a handful of books from the shelves that line your house, and you failed. It's not like it's impossible. You haven't even read half of them. You just can't pull the trigger, you wuss, you watery woman.
Maybe the same thing happens with every potential discard: You start to read it. Four hours later, you wake up on the floor, having culled nothing. Maybe your wife finds you lying there like a body on a crime show, and laughs so hard she has to cough.
Or maybe you're the kind of hapless Harry who has been trying unsuccessfully to get rid of one book, Edgar Johnson's Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, for 25 years. Maybe you're not kidding, either. Let's say you found it again this morning, next to three other books you thought you could relinquish. But Nazeer Kamran's Send in the Idiots turns out to be about autism, and you're interested in autism, so you can't cull that. And you could easily lose the guide to Hollywood's best B-movies, but that your wife wants to keep.
The best bet is Eastern Europe: A Traveller's Companion, published . . . my God, before the fall of the Berlin Wall! It's hopelessly out of date. A clear cull! But no. You're the type who always feels there is some part of his life he has yet to live.
So you begin to read about the Aleksandur Nevski cathedral in Sofia, Bulgaria, which contains the throne of Bulgaria's King Boris III, who died in 1943, right after visiting Hitler. Some say Boris was poisoned because he refused to send 50,000 Bulgarians to a concentration camp. True or not, his death was certainly predicted by the blind prophetess Vanga – to whom Bulgarians still appeal for guidance, after sleeping with sugar cubes under their pillows.
It's the sugar cubes that seal it – a small, unexpected gift from the book to you, its owner. How can you get rid of it now? Is that any way to return a favour?
True, eight years ago, moving house, you actually got the Dickens biography – which you have consulted many times, but never read cover to cover and digested – into a box. Your wife surreptitiously sold the box to the local second-hand bookshop the same day.
Two days later, you arrived home very excited. “Look at what I found at McBurney and Cutler's,” you said to your wife as you walked in the door. “I've been meaning to read this for years!” It was the Dickens book – home again.
This is the Age of Clutter. The totality of information amassed since the beginning of written civilization is now estimated to double every five years, along with the worldwide wad of paper it's printed on. Educated guesses about the number of books published run to 30 million titles.
Then there are the CDs, baking pans, floppy disks, photographs, art projects, snow boots, elastic bands, recipes, vases, cans of tomato juice, skis, lamps, sketch pads, spirit levels, bicycles, bottles of conditioner and other bric-a-brac that have been stored in the collective basement of the most materialistic culture in history. No wonder how-to-get-organized shows are a staple of cable television, and the value of disarray is a red-hot topic in business schools.
Clutter even turns up as a literary theme: In Paul Auster's novel Moon Palace, to name just one instance, the impoverished hero inherits his grandfather's library and makes a home out of the books in more ways than one.
The National Association of Professional Organizers, an organization so organized its website even tells you how to correctly pronounce the organization's acronym (“NAY-poh”), has added 5,000 members since it was founded in 1985. NAPO, which is sponsored by Pendaflex and Rubbermaid and other powerhouses in the $4.6-billion personal-organization industry, can tell you that 80 per cent of what gets filed is never looked at again; and that it takes 30 minutes to “transition into deep critical and creative thought,” but the average North American worker is interrupted at least eight times an hour, so we waste approximately half of every day trying to get productive.
NAPO will tell you that 90 per cent of North Americans are planning to organize some part of their life this year, that 39 per cent plan to organize their closet first (we wear 20 per cent of our clothes 80 per cent of the time), and that 32 per cent of IKEA customers are more satisfied clearing out their closets than they are after sex. NAPO says getting rid of clutter eliminates 40 per cent of the housework in a home.
NAPO also knows that a four-drawer filing cabinet holds 18,000 sheets of paper, and that the No. 1 complaint in offices is (irrelevant fact approaching, bad, bad, cull, cull, cull!) that the office is too cold.
According to NAPO, there are three organizational personalities: pilers, filers and tossers. Pilers are in the majority, enjoy dogs and the company of their friends, and have more master's degrees and doctorates. But the average employee spends three hours a week sorting piles, and has 37 hours of unfinished work on his or her desk at any one time.
NAPO's message seems clear: Cull for your lives! But Barry Izsak, NAPO's president and the author of Organize Your Garage . . . in No Time, says shedding isn't always necessary.
Mr. Izsak has seen hard-core slobdom – people who keep thousands of twist ties and hundreds of Cool-Whip containers and a dead spouse's clothing for three years. Their problems stem from one of two causes: “They have emotional attachments,” or “they don't know how to make the decision to get rid of something.”
Mr. Izsak can help. “Is it still useful? Is it still relevant? Do you have a specific need to hold onto it? And do you have enough space to keep it? And if you do, okay. But if you don't, say to yourself: If I get rid of it, what's the worst thing that can happen?”
That's the question that's harder to answer. Cheryl Mendelson, the lawyer-turned-author of the bestselling Home Comforts, a modern manual of housekeeping, thinks our distress over disorder stems from modern life's alienation from family routines. (She wrote Home Comforts to acquaint the frantic women of her generation with the steadying routines of her grandmother's.) “It seems to me that people are conflicted for the first time in history,” she said over the telephone a few weeks ago. “Because hoarding, resisting the cull, is all about resisting change and time. We feel so threatened by loss. Look at what we're dealing with – our jobs are insecure, our health is insecure, our homes are insecure. And even if they aren't insecure, you're forced to move again and again, And each time, this makes people clutch.”
Clutter, in other words, is a viral form of panic.
According to Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman's enormously popular recent book, A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, clutter sprang up when the climate settled down 10,000 years ago. Human beings were transformed from nomads – who could keep only what we could carry – into stationary, agricultural types, with stuff.
That, at least, is the anthropological angle on a fundamental dilemma of the human condition – whether to go light or heavy. Should we stay still and put down roots, and create traditions and customs that give us meaning but threaten by their very weight to crush us? Or do we keep moving, always free and fresh, but so light we evaporate into nothing? There is no correct answer, which is why cleaning out your kitchen drawer can feel so painful.
Some people ditch everything. A year ago, the singer once known as Jane Siberry sold her house and all her possessions (“all the clothes and counters and jewellery ran out the door like a river”), burned her personal papers and threw out her photographs. She has lived ever since out of hotels and a small knapsack, carrying little more than her guitar, a laptop, two lipsticks and her Manolo Blahnik high heels. She even culled her name, down to one word, “Issa.”
Giving things up was hard. “I would sweat and pant and shake, and I would touch it all,” Issa told me via cellphone (one more possession she kept). “It was almost like having the luxury of dying, but not dying.”
This choice is so rare, people will pay to see it happen. Eight years ago, Dan Ho was married, owned a 1,200-square-foot house, and ran a successful restaurant in Lakeside, Mich. A self-admitted A-type who had “boxes for my boxes,” he was checking one morning to see if a newly installed ceiling fan was balanced when he suffered a seizure. He woke up 20 minutes later and began to question every object in his life.
“I opened my kitchen drawer and found I had three garlic presses. And really – who needs three garlic presses? Especially when I'm a person who likes to mince.”
He has spent the past eight years culling his life, a shedding that included his wife and home. Today, he owns roughly 60 items: No car, very few clothes, a laptop, and not a stick of furniture – a wise decision given that he now has two roommates in a 400-square-foot apartment in Greenwich Village.
“Life absolutely must come before style,' he explained. “Your spirit is your life.” He is an essentialist, not a minimalist: “I espouse keeping things that have meaning. Style needs to have a legacy of emotion.” To buy new dishes to replace Granny's chipped crockery, he said, “runs the risk of being phony.”
Mr. Ho has a smooth, professional voice, and often sounded as if what he was saying had just occurred to him – the ultimate culler, living here and now and nowhere else. These ideas are considered so compelling that the Discovery Health Channel has made Mr. Ho the host of The Dan Ho Show, which airs in Canada in April.
Now I was actually reading bits and pieces of the Dickens biography. I wanted to throw it away and be like Don Ho, but I couldn't bring myself to trade even the most irrelevant detail – that Dickens earned more in a week as a writer at the age of 23 than his father did at his most prosperous, for instance – for reassurances such as “your spirit is your style” and “it's not on the outside, it's on the inside.”
And keeping a masterpiece is easy. It's the ephemera we really miss, the playbills and posters and train schedules and report cards, the stuff that didn't seem scarce enough at the time to be worth preserving.
However, I also knew that my fear of culling was just the flip side of my horror of hoarding. The strongest logic supporting messiness is no different from the logic supporting neatness – but it's emotional rather than rational. It's a logic you can follow only by feeling it. And I knew that if anyone was going to be a less effective culler than me, it was Nicholson Baker, the author of The Mezzanine, A Book of Matches and The Size of Thoughts, among other books. So I called him.
“I have a problem,” he admitted, right off the bat. He had just driven back to his farm in Maine after a morning in the library, where he was finishing his new book. “I mean, I have a lot of books. And we don't have enough shelves for all these things. And I've bought a lot of books doing research on various things.
“And” – he was clearly building to something – “I like to keep them in stacks, on the floor, having long ago had Mistress Masham's Repose read to me by my mother. I thought that way of living, with all the books in piles on the stairway, open, with all the important pages freshly open, was the right way to live.
“It's not just that one wants to hold on to the books – in some ways that's a very easy kind of need. I want to hold onto the particular stack of books, the particular order, the way I've arranged them spatially in a room. So I get sentimentally attached to the piles of the books.”
I was feeling better already. Mr. Baker had donated some books to charity a few weeks earlier. “It looked like stuff I would like to read,” he said, “but there's no way I'll ever read those books.”
“How do you know?” I said.
“Yeah, you don't know that. There's no way to know that, is there? There's absolutely no way. And there are just hundreds that I have looked at with the kind of narrowed eyes of thinking, why am I keeping that book? And then, five years later, there it is, by the bed, and I'm reading it. Very hard to predict. You gotta give a book credit for hanging in with you, for staying with you. It does have something to do with mortality and with the amazing, thrilling durability of books. They just sit around. They do very well in piles, and that's one of the nice things about them.”
The problem with this charming line of thought is that it can careen out of control, badly, a revelation that occurred the same afternoon, at David Mason Books, a second-hand bookstore.
Mr. Mason has a reputation as the most knowledgeable book dealer in Toronto – he has appraised the papers of both Robertson Davies and Mordecai Richler – but as soon as I walked into the store, I felt the bedeguar of bookstore despair creep over me. There is no more effective rebuke to the vanity of intellectual ambition than walking into a second-hand bookstore. No, sir. There were 75,000 freaking books in the place. The polar-exploration section alone was crammed with worthy tomes I would never read. Each one was a rebuke.
Everywhere I looked, delight and surprise were going head to head with hopelessness and the hulking weight of the literary past, my eager curiosity versus my despairing ignorance. This is often why I want to cull, to be rid of this agony.
Mr. Mason was sitting behind his desk, wearing jeans. At 68, he's finally resigned to clutter. “There's no good way to cull books,” he said. “It's a hopeless task, but I have no guilt about it any longer, and I almost enjoy it.” Of course, his version of culling bears no resemblance to a normal human being's. He owns 100 different editions of The Wind in the Willows.
To make matters worse, he has started rereading the books he owns. “I'm 400 books behind in my bedside reading alone,” he said. “I'll read 20 books at the same time. The problem is I lose track of the plots. But there are books that are like paintings in that they bring back memories when you see them. Like old girlfriends – that's essentially what a book is, an experience that you lived through. You start culling, and then you see a book that you're going to sell, and then you start to reread while you're pruning. It's the collecting disease.”
He stopped talking for a moment, and then started again. “Don't you find that life is like that – it's a long process of getting rid of things that bug you?”
At that point, an attractive younger woman walked into the store. She was wearing jeans and a blue sweater. It was Debbie Dearlove, Mr. Mason's second wife.
“We're just talking about culling,” Mr. Mason said to her.
“You're asking him?” Ms. Dearlove said to me.
“He still has the suit he married his first wife in.”
“Well,” he replied, “you can't ask a guy to save the past for 40 years and then ask him to throw it away.”
“It's a form of mental illness,” she said.
The chat rambled on amiably that way. She kept asking him if he thought this or that writer would “hold” – which is to say, be of reliably lasting, keepable, non-cullable interest. Mordecai Richler, Mr. Mason felt, would hold. Alice Munro would hold. Joseph Conrad was holding.
But such things were hard to predict. “Remember,” he said, “William Blake was considered an imbecile in his time. And I don't remember the last time anyone asked me for D.H. Lawrence.”
I experienced a pinging urge to leave, and got up. “Lots of booksellers are killed by falling shelves of books,” Mr. Mason said.
“That could happen to you,” Ms. Dearlove said. “In that back room of yours at home.”
“Well,” Mr. Mason said, “if that's how I go, they'll suspect you.”
The tiff between pro- and anti-mess-management theorists is a mere skirmish next to the donnybrook over culling that has been brewing in the stacks of North American libraries for more than a century. Josephine Bryant and Vickery Bowles, the city librarian and the director of collections of Toronto's immense library system, hesitate even to mention weeding, which is librarian for culling.
“The general public can't conceive of a library throwing things out,” Ms. Bowles told me not long ago, “but the reality is that if we never threw anything out, we'd run out of space.”
As she said this, she knew there were exactly 10,750,466 items in the Toronto library system; magazines, microfilms and DVDs added another half-million. The collection is weeded non-stop: 350,000 items were shed last year, making room for 730,000 new books, all according to strict written procedures and standards.
“We're librarians,” Ms. Bryant admitted. “We have to have written procedures.”Toronto's central reference library keeps a copy of everything, because that's what reference libraries do. “But in the neighbourhood collections, our weeding would be more aggressive, because we want our collections to be as popular and up-to-date as possible, and accurate.”
Nowadays, public libraries cull – this is new – by a book's popularity. Ms. Bowles buys one copy of a book for every six requests she receives. There are 300 Harry Potters and 497 Da Vinci Codes in the system, in standard book form alone. But bestsellers get “read out” in a year or two, whereupon they are sold or donated or pulped (a process itself worth $1-million a year to the library) and a new crop arrives.
And books that don't circulate at least once in four years? They end up on what Toronto librarians privately refer to as the Dusty Book Report.
“Things change,” Ms. Bowles said, and it seemed to make her sad. “We used to have lots on macramé art. And disco dancing. We still do, at the reference library. But you have to get rid of that stuff.”
“It would be like the grocery stores saying, ‘This product doesn't move any more,' “ Ms. Bryant said.
“Branches that don't have good practice in weeding don't have good circulation,” Ms. Bowles added.
Culling by popularity, it turns out, is what has revitalized the public library, despite the Internet and computers. Thirty million items coursed through the Toronto library system last year, making it the biggest circulating library in North America, with the second-biggest readership in the world. The popularity-driven model is spreading around the globe – even in the immigrant-heavy suburbs of Paris, on the theory that a responsive public library could be the antidote to future race riots.
“So there is, in spite of all the predictions about the death of the book, no death of public space devoted to the book,” Ms. Bryant said.
Down in Fairfax County, where $2-million was cut from the budget of the largest regional-library system in the Washington, D.C., area, public libraries are even fiercer: They whack any book that hasn't circulated in two years. Hemingway and To Kill a Mockingbird have made room for more Grisham and King. The powerful American Library Association is all for it, and tirelessly promotes more effective weeding: Start with the out-of-date, move on to the damaged, kill the unread.
Sally Livingston, a children's librarian, even urges weeders to “be decisive. Grit your teeth and take the plunge. If you err in removing a few items, who but you will know?”
Meet Conan, the librarian.
Which is exactly what Juris Dilevko worries about in his office, high in the University of Toronto's faculty of information science where he is an associate professor. In 2003, Prof. Dilevko shocked the library world – not that this is hard to do – with “Weed to Achieve,” a paper that uncovered wide and fervent differences of opinion on the subject of weeding.
He was careful to be neutral – “it's a very fraught subject,” he admits – but his conclusion was clear: “When only the most popular books are found on library shelves,” he wrote, “the intellectual choices available to patrons shrink and become standardized.”
I found Prof. Dilevko sitting in his office with the lights down, a thin, precise man in a brown T-shirt and jacket. He has no argument with careful, considered weeding – “libraries have always weeded,” he pointed out. But he worries that by focusing on popular books, they are becoming less serious and more concerned with “edu-tainment.”
“That philosophy is increasingly becoming the norm,” he said. “Books are commodities – and as such they must obey the demands of the marketplace. Just as the grocery store has to show a quarterly profit, the public library has increasingly thrown its lot in with circulation statistics. Because that's how they get funded.”
He spoke quietly and carefully, but there was resignation in his voice. “Once you stock the shelves of the library with what I call commercial products,” he went on, “there's less of a chance that someone browsing the shelves today will accidentally or serendipitously stumble on, say, Marcus Aurelius. “ He paused again. “Though I realize that's an old-fashioned argument.”
Talking to Prof. Dilevko in his quiet office, his lectures and research arranged precisely around him, everything culled to spare essentials, had an almost monastic feel: It was like sitting inside an enlarged model of a precise, deep mind. He was a 49-year-old man with three MAs and two PhDs, a genuinely knowledgeable scholar whose specialty – how best to gather and spread the world's knowledge – was by his own admission being sidelined.
Eventually the conversation made its way to the subject of his wife, who had done her doctoral research on the classification of graffiti. Apart from that, Prof. Dilevko said, her central passion was handmade Canadian furniture. “We have maybe five pieces. Perhaps we'll buy one more. I don't want you to get the wrong idea, it's not a grand thing – we have no TV, no cable. We live a very frugal existence.”
He paused. “Because that's my wife's philosophy, to leave a very small footprint. And whatever makes my wife happy makes me happy.” Another, longer pause. “I really love my wife,” he said then. “She's my whole life.”
I looked up then. He had tears in his eyes, something neither of us could have predicted.
Then one day I met Matthew Teitelbaum, the director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Mr. Teitelbaum is overseeing a $254-million redesign that will reorganize and refocus the AGO's entire 66,000-item collection, but it was his private collecting I wanted to hear about.
“I'm a big antique-fair wanderer and acquirer,” he said, by way of introducing his personal culling philosophy. “And I met a dealer once, and he had two apartments, side by side. One apartment was where he dealt. And in his other apartment, where he lived, he had 100 objects. And his personal – although somewhat imperfectly realized – dream was that if he found an object, he had to give one up.”
I said it sounded challenging.
“I can't be quite that rigorous,” Mr. Teitelbaum replied, “but I am constantly asking myself, ‘Does this replace something that I value?' I think that collectors, or acquirers, are engaged in some kind of invention. Invention of self, or creativity. When the discovery is sequential, this leads – at its best, that is, if it's not just mental illness – to something that in the totality is new. Whereas the culler is, I think, also inventing. But the process is more kaleidoscopic. Because in moving things around, you're also inventing things – a new thing.”
Somehow, when I heard that, I felt lighter. Maybe there is a new space, neither crowded nor empty, between the lonely asceticism of Jane Siberry and the crushingly acquisitive curiosity of David Mason.
As a boy, Mr. Teitelbaum collected stamps, a habit that tends to inclusiveness, to owning complete issues. But 15 years ago, he sensed something change in the way the culture had begun to use knowledge.
The result is a shelf in his living room today. On it, he told me, “I have a book written by somebody who's blind, next to a book on spectacles, next to a book about peeping Toms, next to a colour-bar test for colour blindness.
“It's just a little moment for me. But in putting that sequence together, about looking, about sight, I'm not interested in the completeness of the collection any more. I was interested in spectacles in relation to sight, not spectacles as they relate to other spectacles. Because then I would never get rid of anything, because it would never be complete.
“We live in a different moment than we did 15 years ago – whether because of the Internet or cellphones or whatever. Completion was much more important then. Now I'm just interested in the relationship between things.”
Robin Pacific, a Toronto artist, explained the same idea to me another way. For a show last December, Ms. Pacific sat in a gallery and gave away 1,670 of her books – to anyone who wanted one.
“This show is definitely about mortality and dying,” she told me on the final morning of her big and sad, freeing and sobering experiment. “When you die, you keep part of yourself alive in others, as memory. So culling these books is a rehearsal for death. Jung said it was only when you reach 50 or 60 that you know your authentic self.
“And that's when you don't need them any more, because your psyche is formed. So I realized: I can't make a mistake by throwing something away. If what I am doing is the work of my soul, it can't be dismantled. It can't be a loss.”
It was a nice idea, and I felt calmer when she said it. In the meantime, I'm axing Eastern Europe: A Traveller's Companion. But I plan to finish the Dickens, some day.
Ian Brown is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.
