Travelin' Light

Brian Sewell remarks in his autobiography that he intends to burn his and his mother's diaries because "to keep for an unknown posterity too many papers is an insidious vanity."  I could not agree more.  I remember when I left my position at Boston University I threw out every lecture note, every draft of a scholarly article, well, just everything in my files, even though I still had a decade of teaching left for me.  I just could not face hauling this stuff on to a new location, and, okay, it was time to become a new Charlie.  Fate or sheer cosmic malevolence had already helped me understand the importance of "travelin' light," as the song goes, when someone got into our house as we, my wife and I, headed for different destinations following a divorce, and took all the twelve place settings (ten or so pieces to a setting) of sterling silver which had been wedding gifts. At the time I thought it was sentimentality that forced the wrenching grief upon me, but later reflection suggested it was caused by the sheer loss of so much value; still I was relieved by the freedom it gave me, and I was thoroughly instructed into a new way of approaching possessions. Way back when I was in graduate school, and my mother died, my wife and I in our makeshift tiny apartment were in no position to take on possessions so we passed on what might have been my share of the ancestral family paintings, rugs, and furniture.  Now I look at every piece of furniture we own as though it came from Goodwill; indeed when my wife and I furnished our gigantic Brookline home, we went out Thursday nights and cadged some really great stuff the rich burgers of the town were tossing out for trash collection.  Later when my husband and I moved out of our house in Cambridge, we went from a fifteen room house to a five room apartment, and sold three thousand or more books, and had a two day yard sale that was legend, if not for the throngs shopping up a storm on the first day, then for the sign of desperation tacked to the tree at the curb on the second which read "Everything free, take what you like." Helping my daughter empty her grandmother's house of almost one hundred years of accumulation, and in the same years dismantling my sister's home of nearly half a century has helped me to realize how much I loath possessions, especially when they can be so loaded with associations, some of them heart aching, but some of them bringing back nightmare memories.  And yet, and yet . . . . I can't seem to empty my dresser drawers and closets of so many, many pieces of clothing that will never grace my body again. I keep thinking I have lightened up, but there they are, all those T-shirts, pieces of underwear still in their wrappers. Why especially do I stop at Brooks Brothers in the Factory Outlet out in the Berkshires to buy more underwear?   I look at all the artworks I have acquired since 1948 when first I paid my then brother-in-law, David, $45 for a painting he had turned out at The Art Students League in New York, a very imperfect allusion to the painting style of Roualt, something I treasure to this day.  What will happen to all this stuff when Richard and I--I will not say "pass," sounds like we are playing a hand of bridge--die, and my kids have no room to house it all, and it has no monetary value?  Hey, I'll be dead, not my problem.  A friend from graduate school days who passed his life in some kind of sterile and wretched observance of service to "scholarship" whatever that might be, always used to say that a man's posterity is measured in the entries in card catalogs and bibliographies, ever sneering at baby makers and householders.  Well, poor guy, he is now utterly demented and I guess thus blissfully ignorant of the fact that most of what he spent his life on has been quite superseded by contemporary notions of what the requirements of the field are all about.  Will a memory of him survive beyond a decade as more than a subject of witty academic anecdotes?