Things will be gone from me. I have watched my father discard and discard and discard again—a lifetime of accumulation. Some of these are items of aesthetic value, of economic value, of sentimental value.
That table, hand-carved from a single massive log and purchased for £5 in Rhodesia, of prodigious artistic quality and sentimental value: I remember it on the long drive home, squeezed in the back seat of our VW bug between my sister and me on the long drive home from up north. This will be gone.
The table—and all of the things around me—will be gone, sooner or later. I will give them away. I will sell them. I will throw them away. Or I will die and they will remain and I will gone.
I like being surrounded by beautiful things. The plein air paintings at home make me happy. So I don’t want to go all hair shirt about things. I think things are a neutral. As long as you don’t take them seriously, they are not evil or good. They just are.
What do I really have? Experiences evoked by actions. Memories of actions. All of these are “now” and are inside me. Memories are not “then.” My dim memory of a hot bumpy ride on strip roads with a table in the back seat beside me is a thought I am toying with now, in a Singapore hotel restaurant, almost 60 years after the event.
The experience of meeting people and talking to them is now. The manager of the hotel repeatedly scolding me for not giving a fuck about masks and my calm indifference and kind acknowledgment of his admonition. (And playing his mask game when I get up to go back to the buffet). That’s now. And my feelings are now.
These memories and these real time experiences cannot be removed from me. These are what cannot be removed from me. I don’t fear losing the inner experiences. And I know that the memories of the past are malleable by me, now.
So that’s all I have. The inner state, the opinions and ideas that I choose to keep, or alter, or ignore. These too will be gone when I die. A universe blinks off. So be it.
All of which helps explain my father’s eagerness to give things away. “You like that painting? Please take it.” No thought of sentiment, of economic value. These things mean nothing. The sentiment remains inside him, even if the painting is no longer on his wall. The idea of converting the painting to money is pointless, just a shape-shifting exercise. No, he is freeing himself of being possessed by things around him. What remains is the inside man, a universe within itself.
We live. We die.
The things, the money. These are just interesting toys. Then they become tedious.
Live.
And don’t take yourself too damned seriously.