Waste Not, Want Not

I was brought up short on page 178 of the English translation of Roberto Bolaño's The Third Reich when the narrator describes buying a book or pamphlet from a street vendor reading it then and there, actually saying "I glanced through it and then tossed it in a trash can."  It is something I cannot imagine my doing. My shelves are filled with the results of casual curiosity.  I am not a hoarder, but at the same time I consider anything I have purchased deserves its time on my shelves, its very materiality must be respected, before perhaps a timely review will suggest casting the item away.  This instinct which I choose to believe came to me from having grown up in the Great Depression, even if in very comfortable circumstances, gives me pride.  I like to "make do" with what I have.  Just this week I was putting on a pair of kakhi pants certainly a decade or so old, with frayed cuffs, with a serious tear, neatly sewn by my beloved, and I have to say, without giving a glance to a several other pairs of kakhi pants newer and in far better condition on nearby hangers.  I don't feel comfortable wearing them when this older pair "will do." In another closet I have been pulling out winter clothes to give to Goodwill in preparation for living the rest of my life in the tropics, and as I worked there, I came across a number of light weight summer formal jackets, some actually with matching pants, thus a suit--indeed the one in which I married six years ago--and my heart sank.  It is not exactly a perversion but there is something peculiar in my appetite for seeking out the perfect lightweight summer sport jacket.  There must be six or seven in the closet here, two or three in New York, and already four on the rack in Sarasota.  Of these there are only two I believe that I wear enough to justify owning them.  When I go to throw one of them out, something stays my hand.  "But, wait," my inner voice counsels, "you may really love that jacket next season, may have underestimated it all along.  Once gone, never retrieved."  And yet, in the course of my life I have left, moved out, emptied of furnishings, four or five houses where I had lived a wonderful life, full of excellent memories, and never looked back.  Thirty years in Cambridge, and all I can see when I go back into the town are the uneven sidewalks and the unkempt crowds.  No nostalgia at all!  I must work to develop the same indifference to the contents of my closets.  A long ago lover of mind counseled that one should never own more than one change of clothing.  Extreme, perhaps, but I get the point even if I cannot surrender to it.