When it comes to clutter, there are two kinds of people in the world: pack rats and tossers. I'm a pack rat. I have clip files dating back to the late 1960s, sorted by subject, not to mention college term papers, Watergate documents, and raw research for books I've written.
This is sort of defensible, since I'm a journalist and I need reference materials. I don't quite trust the Internet's "bookmarks." There's nothing quite so satisfying as a hard-copy report or congressional hearing that you can mark up, or even yellowing newspaper clips ("but from 1975?" my wife wonders).
I'm also a pack rat about stuff unrelated to my trade -- treasures from my kids, parents, and grandparents; files of old letters; journals; skits from college reunions; memorabilia of trips. I'm either sentimental or narcissistic or both.
But I hadn't realized quite how extreme a pack rat I was until the moment came to sell the family house. After 23 years in the near suburbs, it's time to move into town. That means a smaller place, without the entire third floor that I've been encroaching into year by year, file by file. A smaller house, in turn, means I have to start tossing.
So far, I've filled up about 150 large trash bags. I've found a particularly satisfying hardware-store kind called "contractor bags" that are 3 mils thick instead of the supermarket's 1 mil, so they don't break when you overstuff them.
Of course, I'm not just tossing indiscriminately. I'm sorting. I disappear up to the third floor each evening, and I return in a state of reverie.
Sure, there's little point in keeping the files of every speech I've given or clip files of extinct public arguments. These get tossed.
On the other hand, what a pleasure to revisit my father's love letters to my mother during the big war, via V-Mail. What a nice memory to peruse household records from the year in Greenwich Village when we lived on almost nothing. I found an anthem that my grandfather composed and had privately printed in 1933, to FDR and the NRA.
And how humbling to read a comment from my old political science professor, John D. Lewis, on a senior honors paper I wrote on Charles de Gaulle. "On the whole, interesting and well done. Occasionally, it slips into the English essay style; i.e., evidence could perhaps be produced should that become necessary." The man had me pegged as a newspaper columnist early on.
The process of sorting and tossing -- and keeping -- has turned into a personal archaeology. And it's also an instructive 30-year political history. For the stuff that I write about keeps recurring, like an endless Buddhist cycle. The same struggles never end.
My files on child poverty span nearly four decades. It was a national disgrace in 1965, and it still is.
The old files on union organizing are as contemporary as today's struggle to organize nursing home workers -- or the textile strikes of a century ago. Only the names are Irish and Italian rather than Hispanic and Haitian.
Reports from the 1970s on the need for national health insurance read like today's political debates, except today the costs are higher, the constraints on doctors and patients more onerous, and the nursing shortage more dire.
I have materials on the great tax and budget wars -- of 2001 and 1997 and 1989 and of course 1981. The argument never ends. Do tax cuts for the rich really cause economic growth? Do we really need a balanced budget?
For liberals like me, these archives produce a few nice memories of scattered victories. Community reinvestment. Cleaner water. Nixon impeached! And of some big defeats like the deregulation of nearly everything and big money's takeover of politics. The same financial scandals repeat. Only the scoundrels are different.
I'm still a confirmed pack rat, albeit a leaner one. It's probably not a bad idea to do this kind of cleanout at least once a decade, whether you need to or not.
A jaded real estate broker advised: "Toss it now, or your children will have to toss it later." Yes, but that seems a bit morbid. I'm still in my 50s, and I expect to keep revisiting these treasures over the next several decades. I hope my kids do, too.
As for the endlessly recurring political struggles, are they worth it? I think of Albert Camus's existential essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" on the character who spent eternity rolling a rock up a hill. Camus concluded: "One imagines Sisyphus happy."
