And he went away sad, for he had many possessions.
We went to Rochester last weekend for a wedding (not ours), and I saw my stuff again.
It had been, what, five months? Four and a half? It’s getting harder and harder to measure time in anything but sharply defined eras. Each move wrenches us into another unique world. College, dating in small town, marriage and apartment, city house of Beth’s parents, cabin in woods…there’s a Wendell Berry essay in A Continuous Harmony (I think) where he asks how a marriage can grow when every few years you move and leave all your loves behind. You get old enough, friends scattered behind in various states, the kids leave, and the only visible fruits of your marriage are the lines in each other’s faces. That’s extreme, I think—he forgot your 401(k)—and anyhow old people aren’t just wrinkled faces. Right? Everything else is wrinkled too. But there’s a point there.
Not that it’s my point. My point is that I had a brief reunion with my stuff. I’d forgotten most of it existed. I was a wandering prince come to claim a kingdom that was remembered but strange.
Our bed was royal. I had always thought it grand—a wedding gift with wooden headboards and a queen-size mattress. Now it seemed really to belong to some queen. Certainly not me. It was too soft. Gigantic. There had to be guards somewhere that would kick us out.
Then there were the books. Soon after we married, I decided I’d dodged too much of my college reading and made up for it by purchasing boxloads of used classics. Purchasing. One day, I’ll read them. But seeing them again, scanning the slovenly shelves that grace my long-suffering in-laws’ dining room, I couldn’t believe how many there were. Did I really own that many chunks of thought? Were that many hours of my future already earmarked for absorption? I felt rich, and slightly trapped.
Which brings in the Rich Young Man. I tossed him in at the top because he popped up in yesterday’s Gospel with a spooky relevance. Am I already too wealthy? Most of the world might think so. But rather than worry over some arbitrary stuff limit which I may have passed, I know I have too much because I haven’t missed a lot of it for months. Some of the stuff I didn’t even want when I first saw it again; the familiar burden and craving settled onto me slowly. Some of the second-rate books, the boxes of memorabilia, the redundant computer hardware—only with time did I assume the mantle of ownership. Yet here, back on the farm, much of it feels like a distant, unruly kingdom which I both love and loathe, and must one day rule wisely.
Yet for those things of worth—the lovely bed, the better books, and of course far more for the home and the lovely people who will share their home with us—there was the distinct wonder of discovering what I thought I knew. It’s the theme of my favorite book—Manalive. Though some are called to poverty, many of us are in the odd position of being blessed with more things than we can see properly. The hero of Manalive claims he can’t love his unless he leaves it. I always agreed intellectually; now I begin to have empirical proof.
“`Science!’ cried the stranger. `There is only one good things science ever discovered—a good thing, good tidings of great joy— that the world is round.’
“I told him with civility that his words conveyed no impression to my intelligence. `I mean,’ he said, `that going right round the world is the shortest way to where you are already.’
“`Is it not even shorter,’ I asked, `to stop where you are?’
“`No, no, no!’ he cried emphatically. `That way is long and very weary. At the end of the world, at the back of the dawn, I shall find the wife I really married and the house that is really mine. And that house will have a greener lamp-post and a redder pillar-box. Do you,’ he asked with a sudden intensity, `do you never want to rush out of your house in order to find it?’
G. K. Chesterton, Manalive
