December 6th, 2008 by Chris Eng

You weren’t around for The Purge I, I know. That was a few months ago when I roped my friends into driving me and nine boxes of books down to Pulp Fiction to lighten my collection of Stuff. And in the short term it did. My bookshelves were blessed with noticeable gaps here and there, and there was breathing room… for a couple of weeks, anyway.

And then the books came back, because that’s what I collect, by and large. Yes, I collect comics, but let’s be honest—those are just really skinny books. And I have other collections, but they don’t take up much room. (For instance, I have all the Buffy DVDs, but Buffy’s done and that collection’s not gonna get any bigger… well, except for the new comics, which I’m buying.) No, I collect books primarily, and books are a collection that takes up an assload of room. So much room, in point of fact, that at least half my books are in storage—about 20 boxes at my house and another 15–20 in my home town.

It’s pretty hard to read books in storage and even harder to read those a ferry ride away. And when you can’t access them to any degree, it really makes you consider why you have them. “Well, someday we’ll have the room to display them,” my inner collector pipes up shrilly. “Someday we’ll be in a bigger house with plenty of shelf space and all our books will be on display!” That’s a nice fantasy, but I’m not sure it’s not completely delusional. Even assuming that the next place Carla and I move into will be larger (which is not necessarily assured), I’d have to assemble my collection of books in one place (which will require effort, a truck and ferry fare) and buy more shelves to house them. Well, shelves aren’t cheap (though there are inexpensive ones to be had) and books are friggin’ heavy.

There is wisdom to be gleaned from that line in Fight Club when Brad Pitt sagely intoned that the things you own end up owning you, and that’s something that anyone that’s had to move upward of 100 boxes of boxes could tell you. You start to consider places to live based on the amount of boxes you’ll have to move (and the amount of stairs you’ll have to carry them up), and eventually you just never want to move at all, no matter how bad your home situation is. “I don’t care if I live with an abusive grizzly bear—how could that be worse than packing, moving, and unpacking my crap?!”

So over the past year or so, in the interests of not having my stuff own me, I’ve been paring down my life. Getting rid of Stuff, which is mostly books. A few months ago was The Purge I, which was certainly a success, but I’ve been driven to further reevaluate the rest of the Stuff I own. So I pared down and I made some hard and brutal cuts and I pared down some more and I boxed everything up and took a count after the dust had cleared. End result: thirteen boxes of books and two short boxes of comics to be sold and/or gotten rid of. The storage area in my house is now half emptier than it was a week ago.

The funny thing was, at the end I felt like I had to keep going—find just a few more books to get rid of, clean up my life just that little bit more. Then I looked over at the thirteen boxes I’d already culled and thought, “Hm… I think we’re good for now.”

I feel particularly proud of being able to let go of a couple of collections I was assembling for the sake of collecting—most notably, my Harlan Ellison books and my Vancouver Film Fest Guides. The Ellison books were particularly hard to give up. Almost all of his books are out of print now and they’re continually sought by collectors, so you generally don’t just find stacks of them kicking around—one in a used book store here, one a year-or-so later over there, etc. I’ve been collecting him since I was fifteen or sixteen and over the years have come to amass a respectable collection of 35 or so books (out of the 70+ he’s written). But thinking about it recently, I came to realize that almost all of his stories that I come back to and re-read time after time are contained in his best-of omnibus The Essential Ellison, which I not only have but which is signed—why would I need more than that?! (Okay, there’s a few others I need to keep, but probably not more than, say, six, which leaves about 28 unspoken for.)

The Film Fest Guides I’ve been collecting basically since I moved to Vancouver in the mid-’90s and have been an annual tradition with me. An annual tradition that’s lost a lot of its magic since I stopped being a habitual cinemaphile who went to movies every other day. But I kept buying the guides and sticking them next to the others on the shelf. This past year I barely gave it more than a cursory glance before consigning it to its dusty fate. And really, what’s the point in that? I never go back to the old guides and sift through them for movies to see. I never use them as the reference guides they should be. They’re just something to look at—a collection notable for being a collection. And I don’t have space in my house or life for that anymore.

There’s a part in the Sterling article I quoted a couple of entries back where he asks, in essence, why we allow the things that surround us to be anything less than excellent or beautiful. If there’s a piece of art in your house that’s, y’know, kind of nice, why do you have it? If you own a series of books or DVDs that are only okay, why do you allow them to take up space? If the things you own don’t elevate your soul or inspire you or make you come back to them again and again from their sheer awesomeness, why give them any of yourself at all?

It’s exactly that argument that’s been guiding my buying over the last month or so: “If I buy X, a year from now will I thank myself for doing so? Will my life be better for having bought it? Or will it be something I give scant attention to and then never really look at again?” And let me tell you—even just this far, it’s stopped me from buying a few things that have no lasting value to me.

And that’s the criteria I used in evaluating the Stuff I already own: “If this disappeared from my collection, would I even notice a year from now?” And for the Stuff in storage: “Did I even notice this was packed away?”

Having less Stuff is freeing. It’s satisfying, and it makes the stuff you’ve decided to keep worth so much more because of the purging. And, seriously—take a look around you and think about how good it would feel if you could say that everything on those shelves—every single thing you own—was something of amazing quality and made your life better. That would be a place to come home to. That would be a collection worth owning.