I’ve been thinking a lot about possessions lately, as the now-inevitable reports of violence inflicted by Black Friday shoppers on one another during the struggle for discounted Xboxes and television sets has coincided in my life with the depressing and exhausting task of cleaning out my mother’s apartment after her death at age 90.
Stuff . Even the most financially disciplined middle-class Americans have more of it they they will ever use and a lot of us have closets, storage lockers and basements filled with possessions we cannot even remember that we own. What is truly impressive, when you are going through the stuff that remains at the end of a very long life, is the valuelessness, in both an emotional and a monetary sense, of nearly every object unmoored from specific experiences.
The boxes of family pictures are, as the commercial says, priceless, in that they reflect both ordinary and extraordinary scenes from life in a family that no longer exists-the one into which I was born. But the knicknacks, the decorative Teddy bears (why do people give the sentient elderly stuffed animals as gifts, anyway?), the unworn clothes my mother kept buying from catalogues almost until the day of her death: All now belong to the “river of things” that flows into a bottomless pit. The same dark river awaits the putative bargains snapped up on Black Friday, however ardently they may be desired at the moment by consumers willing to pepper spray their fellow shoppers.
Read Full Article »