On Defenestration

What a great word!   Taking down the window...

Taking down the forest...

I have a soft spot in my heart for Garrison Keillor, even if he has been fired by American Public Radio for sexual misconduct.  

He saved me from dying of depression during those two years I lived in Charleston SC in the 1980's, teaching in a school that didn't appreciate me, living in a convent that smothered me. I retreated into National Public Radio ( and American, and International) and listened to the entire Hobbit/Lord of the Rings saga there, and , every Saturday, the Prairie Home Companion.  Not to mention "Car Talk" , "Songs for Aging Children," "Desert Island Discs" and other great shows.

Anyway... this morning on Facebook, he had a long post, and it included this part:

"At the moment, my house is in chaos because we’re moving from a big roomy house to a smallish apartment, which has brought us face to face with decades of materialism. We now see that we own a great deal of stuff that (1) we don’t use, (2) we have no attachment to, and (3) we need to rid ourselves of. Truckloads of stuff have gone out the door and there is yet more.
My particular problem is the compulsive purchase of books. Shelves of heavy tomes, classics of Western civilization, dozens of dictionaries, atlases, the complete works of great authors, two bookcases of biographies, enough books to occupy all my waking hours until I am four-hundred-and-one years old. I bought them myself, bag by bag, out of the lust for breadth of knowledge and now I am loading them into boxes and hauling them to the car.
I thought it’d be painful, the defenestration of my library, but it is exhilarating --- to feel the burden of my pretensions lighten as I drop my long-running impersonation of an educated man and return to being just another elderly barefoot peasant, one who loves his fireplace on a chill November night and a warm supper with his good wife across the table and some light gossip and then the great pleasure of undressing in the dark and slipping in under the covers and lying next to her and taking her hand. I do not take the complete essays of Michel de Montaigne to bed with me; I would rather have her.
I think it was Montaigne who said that the best sign of wisdom is cheerfulness. I read that when I was in college, at a time when we ambitious literati felt that the true sign of brilliance was agony and desperation, and so we attempted to impersonate it though we were children of privilege --- even I, the postal worker’s son, had the great luxury of an inexpensive college education, financed by me washing dishes in the cafeteria, a liberal arts education that encouraged me to imagine myself as an artist, a novelist. And so I surrounded myself with books.
I think it was also Montaigne who said that you cannot be wise on another man’s wisdom. I could reach for my phone and Google it and get the exact words but I don’t want to let go of her hand. She has spent a busy month clearing out the house and playing viola in the pit at the opera. I was away from home most of last week and she was plagued by insomnia, and now she is falling asleep. A month ago I was an intellectual striving to make intelligent comment on the new world of 2018 and now I am an elderly peasant whose physical presence helps his beloved to sleep. Some would see this as a loss of status; I do not. I lie in the marital bed, her hand relaxes, which makes me happy, and I turn out the light. I imagine myself back to 1948 and Uncle Jim’s farm. He lifts me up onto Prince’s back who is hitched to the hayrack along with Scout. My face is against his mane, my arms around his neck. Off we trot to the meadow to rake up hay, the harness jingling, Uncle Jim clucking to the horses, the sweetness of new-mown grass in my nostrils, and that is all there is, there is no more."

I have written before about the small space in which I live; small in comparison to my childhood friends and college classmates who live in large houses. But at age 70, we all have the need to
declutter... defenestrate.  Like Keillor, my clutter involves books. 

But I just wanted to post his words here, so I can return to them later.