WITH DOWNSIZING ALL YOU NEED IS ONE BOOK



I'm writing this in the upstairs living room while the carpet people are making a racket hammering nails into the bare floor of my downstairs study. This hasn't stopped my creative juices from flowing though. They stopped flowing much earlier, at around 5.00 a.m., when I got up to remove ten zillion books from my bookcases so the carpet layers could move them around.

You may well ask: Why this obsessive behavior, Adrian, what's going on? Are you becoming carpetophobic all of a sudden? Is it the color, the pattern, the pile perhaps that revolts you?

No, it's nothing like that, dear reader. I love that carpet. Its as good as new; its sunflower yellow has cheered me on for twenty years; it has inspired truly great writing -- well, I think so anyway. No, it's not I who hates that carpet. It's my real estate lady. My house will never sell, she says, unless I put in realtor beige, the one color that no one dislikes.

Which brings me to the subject of moving or rather preparing to. As I am only moving into the city from just outside, that shouldn't be a big deal, right? Wrong! It's a very big deal, it's a deal that Hercules would have blanched at. "Please not that," he would have begged, "anything but that. Give me the Augean stables to clean but not Korpel's basement. Don't make me sift through old jigsaw puzzles, yellowed baby clothes, crumbling lampshades, rusty meat grinders, cracked dinner plates and spider-infested whatnots."

But I'm not Hercules, and I have no choice. So for the last three months I have been throwing things away with a vengeance. And with every gizmo I threw in the dumpster I swore never, ever again to buy anything I don't need. No more apple corers, lava lamps, bagel cutters and bread machines. No more wonder wrenches and miracle pliers. And above all, no more books.

Now, it may surprise you that I am down on books. Actually, I'm not, I just don't want to own them anymore. Whenever I buy a book, I read it once, and then it just lies there. Doing nothing for the next twenty years. Is that scholarship, is that the life of the mind? Of course not; it's pure consumerism, is what it is. Besides, with my memory, one thick book is really all I need. Give me one year between readings, and it's a new book as far as I'm concerned.

So I'm going to downsize. I'll sit quietly in my only lounge chair, sipping a mint julep from my only tumbler and slowly reading my only book. And when it's finished I'll bring it back to the library.

At Random - Adrian Korpel