TT: Never enough stuff

Somebody tweeted the other day about an essay of mine that appeared in a coffee-table book called America at Home: A Close-Up Look at How We Live that was published in 2008. I’d completely forgotten that I wrote this piece, and had to look it up in my electronic files to recall what it was about. Though I no longer live in the apartment described below, I rather liked the piece on renewed acquaintance, and thought that you might feel the same way.
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“Simplify, simplify,” Henry David Thoreau exhorted us in Walden, in which he tells how he spent two years living in a hand-built one-room shack so as to free himself from the shackles of stuff. Me, I live in a small New York apartment whose walls are lined with eight hundred books, three thousand compact discs, and thirty-six lithographs, etchings, screenprints, woodcuts, and watercolors, and it’s been five years since any of those numbers last trended downward. Middle-class Manhattanites typically live in close quarters, and I’m no exception: I keep my sauce pans in the oven and sleep in a loft. But that doesn’t stop me from wedging more stuff into my Upper West Side home, whose neatness (for I am very neat) arises from the fact that my closets are so full that the only way I can cram something new into them is to throw out something old.
I am, in other words, a collector, and chances are that so are you. Most Americans are collectors, though some are more systematic about it than others. The works of modern American art that I own, for instance, are a collection in every sense of the word, so much so that a friend started referring to my apartment as “the Teachout Museum.” Not that any of my pieces are priceless–I’m big on eBay–but they still amount to something more than a bunch of miscellaneous prints. That’s how you know you’ve amassed a collection: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, which is a polite way of saying that you own too damn much of something for any immediately obvious purpose. My father collected mugs–but why? What did he get out of looking at the shelves on which dozens of dusty mugs were arranged as carefully and lovingly as I now hang the prints by John Marin, Milton Avery, Hans Hofmann, and Fairfield Porter that grace the walls of my living room? It never occurred to me to ask him. The mugs were as much a part of him as his deep voice, and that was that.
Are we what we collect? Sometimes the answer is self-evident. Louis Armstrong and H.L. Mencken, who in every other way were utterly dissimilar, preserved every scrap of personal memorabilia they could squeeze into their multi-story homes. I once spent a rainy afternoon leafing through Mencken’s old hospital bills. Both men, in essence, collected themselves, and with good reason, since they were great artists through whose self-collections scholars now rummage in search of insight. But even those of us who have no like claim on posterity seem no less compelled to collect something, be it mugs, lithographs, recipes, stamps, matchbooks, or plastic handbags. And while I know two collectors who have gone so far as to rent apartments devoted solely to the storage and display of their collections, it seems in the nature of most Americans to want to keep their stuff closer to hand. Not a few of the finest museums in America began life as the private homes of wealthy art collectors.
Might it be that the presence of a collection, whether humble or haute, is part of what makes a house a home? If so, then it might also be that we are all self-collectors, and that our collections are, in Alec Wilder’s phrase, clues to a life. Perhaps my father, who spent the middle part of his life as a traveling salesman, had a story to go with each of his mugs. I know that each of the carefully framed family snapshots that hang on the walls of the house where he lived, and where my mother still lives, tells a little piece of the story of my family. They, too, are a collection, one of no value to anyone but my kinfolk, to whom they are as priceless as any of the Rembrandts hanging at the Met.
Needless to say, you can’t take it with you, and so from time to time I make yet another virtuous but futile attempt to prune my shelves and clean out my closets. Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s greatest domestic architect, was a passionate stuff-hater who actually went so far as to design houses that were intended to prevent their owners from piling up needless, life-complicating possessions. In my heart I know he was right, and that the accumulation of too much stuff is a drag on the spirit. Yet I still can’t help but smile wryly when I remember that Kentuck Knob, one of Wright’s most beautiful residences, was later purchased by a British baron who collects…houses.