bombs in bottles
I checked out Dominique Loreau's L'art de la Simplicité because it was shelved with the "sustainable living" books. On perusal, I realized it's not really about "sustainable living" at all. It should be shelved with books like Fumio Sasaki's Goodbye, Things and Joshua Becker's The More of Less and Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Joy of Tidying Up (all of which sit side by side in my local library). It was not what I expected, and it's making me think about minimalism in a new-to-me context.
Last year, I went through a big phase of reading "minimialism" books. I also sank $10,000 and six months into a home update, after I sank three months into a major cleanout.
It was necessary. I was three years into widowhood. The house was full of things we kept because we - my husband and I - found them useful in the life we shared.
But that life is over, and too many of those things were no longer useful. They were just clutter. Debris from a shared life that ended. I wasn't using any of it. All that stuff did was remind me of the home I no longer had and the life I no longer lived.
The stuff - both used and unused - sat on and in a house that we inherited when my grandfather died. We'd moved in without changing anything. The carpet was cheap and worn; the walls ranged from "okay" to "badly in need of repainting." Most of the rooms still had contractor-grade "boob lights," which I have never liked:
So I yeeted stuff. Tore up carpet. Had hardwood floors refinished (the floors alone were half my budget). Bought new-to-me lamps and light fixtures. Bought a new bed frame (which ate another quarter of the budget). Installed shelves. Scoured thrift stores for picture frames and other sundries that fit the house's mid-century style and would last. Updated furniture. Painted and painted and painted.
I'm happy with the results. In fact, I'm glad I did the house project when I did. With choppy economic, political, social, and Constitutional seas ahead, at least my house now looks exactly as I want it to. I can happily become one of those little old ladies who dies with a time capsule house from 40 years prior.
Revisiting a mid-2010s "trendy" minimalist text, though, feels weird.
I found L'art de la Simplicité almost immediately grating. The feeling surprised me. I am a sucker for French fashion bloggers and minimalism books; I assumed the union of those things would be catnip.
I read far enough to say: It's not Loreau's fault, or the book's. This book absolutely would have been catnip to me a year ago. I've changed.
Nowhere was this more obvious to me than when Loreau asks five starter questions:
"What makes my life complicated" is nothing that a closet cleanout can fix. The number one thing making my life complicated is carrying my own widowhood.
I exist in a world that is good, in so many ways. I mean "good" in the Genesis sense: "And God saw that it was good." Watching my garden come in, preparing for the arrival of a flock of chicks, seeing a student's face light up when she realizes for the first time in her K-12 career that those little stickers on the spines of library books *mean things* that will *make her life easier* - so much in this world is good. Full stop.
That same world has a permanent tear in its fabric that cannot and should not exist. My husband used to be there. Now he's not. That should not be possible, yet it is. It should not be possible for that unspeakable horror to exist alongside a world that is so good, yet it does. His absence - his abysmal, chthonic absence - exists directly in that world that is so good. He is Not Here, and the world Is, and these things Should Not Both Be. One should cancel out the other. They do not.
No book about streamlining my wardrobe, eating mindfully, or embracing the austere beauty of an empty room is going to change or fix that. I know. I spent half of last year trying.
"Is it worth it?" is a pointless question. I was never consulted. I did nothing to get here. I could have done nothing to prevent my getting here.
Is it worth it to go on? Brutal honesty moment - I should not be asked that question. Because my answer is "no," actually. Yet I persist. Despite my deepest yearnings, I go on living, and there seems to be nothing at all I can do to stop it. (There is no reason I should not have died of my injuries in the same crash that killed my husband, except that I didn't.) "Worth it" is a meaningless question to me. I no longer experience myself as having control over life or death.
"When am I happiest?" Let me go on being brutal. Over the course of the past year, I have lost all interest in asking about or pursuing happiness. Pursuing happiness has never gotten me anywhere, before or since my life got turned inside-out. Even before the accident, I could not have told you what "happiness" meant to me or when I had experienced it.
These days, I'm far more interested in pursuing *satisfaction* than happiness. So far, I'm making better progress. I don't know what "happiness" is, but I know what "satisfaction" is.
When am I most satisfied? It's not when a book is trying to convince me that my stuff is dissatisfying, certainly.
"Is having more important than being?"
I knew Loreau and I would not see eye to eye on this when I read "A lipstick, some ID, a little money: the only three things a woman needs in a handbag" and immediately thought "why do I need lipstick? ...wait, why do I need a handbag?" Wherever I am in my personal relationship to things, it's not where this book is. This book is a solution to a different problem than the one I face.
"How far am I prepared to divest?" At the moment, no farther than I have. I cut a bit too deep with the cleanout; there have been several things this year I've thought "I would use that if I still had it."
I haven't actually replaced any of those things. I've found something else to serve the purpose or simply gone without. Clearly I don't actually *need* a red sweater, or hard copies of Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue trilogy. But I have reached what Marie Kondo calls the "click point," at which I don't have things I consider superfluous.
All this could just be me reaching my personal "minimalist" Zen (scare quotes because nothing about my house reads "minimalist." "Curated," but not "minimalist"). Yet it's also making me wonder if "minimalism" isn't one more trend that divides our attention from each other and from communal solutions which are the only solution to communal problems.
See, before picking up L'art de la Simplicité, I read Katherine Cross's Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix. My takeaway from that book (besides a sense of shame at having engaged in precisely the Extremely Online behaviors Cross calls out) was that social media is enormously effective at preventing collective action. We snark, we dunk on celebrities with witty quote-tweets, and we really think we did something there.
I'm now wondering if "minimalism" isn't the same thing. Time spent rearranging our stuff - without addressing the deeper needs that cause stuff to accumulate - is time we spend alone, in our houses. We think we're rearranging our stuff toward some finish line at which we will experience or become better versions of ourselves. THEN we can go forth and change the world. Just as soon as we decide whether or not to get rid of that cute little ceramic owl knickknack.
If I learned anything from the last year, it's this: You don't become a better person by rearranging your stuff. You rearrange your stuff because it no longer reflects the person you are always already becoming.
You don't need to know who, exactly, you want to emerge from the newly-cleared space. But you sure asf better know that things cannot go on as they are. At which point you do not need yet another book or YouTube video or seminar to bestir you. You don't need to know what happiness looks like, but you do need to team up with your own dissatisfaction.
In what is becoming a standard disclaimer for me: I don't have answers. But I'm certain that anti-consumer consumerism or dunking on @elonmusk aren't it.
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