The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up:...by Marie Kondo

[Steve]

Ian: to conserve time and energy, and to preserve the cleanliness of our homes, we should compile a list of the very best books. if a book does not make the list, cast it into the fire.

Link

[Ian]

i think this is about more than tidiness. marie kondo seems to have had a tough childhood. apparently her family didn't pay much attention to her. she found it difficult to develop relationships with people, so she developed imaginary relationships with inanimate things.

we seem to respond to mental disorder in different ways. for example, some people hoard things. maybe they're clinging to the past. other people purge things. maybe they're trying to free themselves from the past.

maybe kondo tries to bring order to her mind by bringing order to her house. she seeks happiness by getting rid of things, especially things reminiscent of the past. few things reflect the past more than books. naturally, kondo finds every excuse to get rid of them.

kondo says: if you haven't read the book, throw it away. if you read half of the book, throw it away. if you're still thinking of keeping the book, touch it and see if you feel a thrill. if not, throw it away. make sure that you don't open the book and start reading it, because "reading clouds your judgment."

these are the thoughts of a twisted mind. kondo thinks that tidying is more important than reading. she thinks she can be happy living in a barren home.

i can't dispute that getting rid of books would make tidying easier, but tidiness is not our main goal. our main goal is to have a happy home. tidiness helps, but books can do much more to make us happy.

it's easy for me to say: i want my home to always be tidy. but am i the one doing all the tidying? am i doing all the cleaning, all the washing, all the bathing? you can get rid of almost everything in your house, and live in a dull, artless, perfectly modern environment, but someone still has to maintain the cleanliness every single day. the dust and messes keep piling up. getting rid of books won't change that. someone will always need to do housework.

when mom worked at the san diego temple, they periodically cleaned thousands of individual pieces of crystal, one by one, from an elaborate chandelier. wouldn't we save time and energy if temples were to adopt a more simple, modern aesthetic, including fewer things to "obstruct our line of vision"? yes, but then the temples would be ugly. we're willing to work for the sake of beauty.

[Steve]

Well, I think Marie Kondo is probably a well-meaning lady. I harbor no hard feelings toward her, nor I do I judge her as "twisted" because her views are a little different from mine. I disagree with many of your conclusions about the things she says, though I agree with some of your thoughts.

The temple is an excellent example. We toured the Payson temple a week ago. It was nice to see how tidy it was. There were a few select pieces featured in any given room and there were plenty of clean, empty surfaces. Not that a temple's interior design is intended to be entirely prescriptive for each of our homes. There are observable patterns, but all of us have different tastes and preferences that affect us in different ways. Some feel lively and comfortable in a busy room. Others feel lively and comfortable in a sparsely-furnished room. Cleanliness and order are divine, though. They can be difficult to maintain, but we should try our best. It is the responsibility of all family members in a home.

A simple, modern aesthetic is ugly to some. It is delightful to others. Sometimes maintaining a simple aesthetic is even harder than the alternative, but as you say, we're willing to work for the sake of beauty.

[Ian]

true, ugly is the new beautiful. brings to mind an essay that was written a few years ago:

The Tyranny of Artistic Modernism
by Mark Anthony Signorelli and Nikos A. Salingaros (August 2012)

We who live in the Western world at the present time continue to suffer under the reign of a great tyranny — the tyranny of artistic modernism. The modernist aesthetic, which dominates our age, takes a variety of forms in the respective arts — in architecture, a lack of scale and ornamentation combined with the overwhelming deployment of materials like glass, steel, and brutalist concrete; in the plastic arts, a rejection of natural forms mixed with an unmistakable tendency towards the repulsive or meretricious; in literature, non-linear narrative, esoteric imagery, and an almost perfect lack of poetic form and diction. Yet common now to the practice of all these arts are certain primal impulses which may be said to form the core of the modernist aesthetic — a hostility and defiance towards all traditional standards of excellence, discovered over millennia of craftsmanship and reflection; a notion of the artist’s freedom as absolute, and entirely divorced from the ends of his art; and, as Roger Scruton has so clearly demonstrated, a refusal to apply the category of beauty to either the creation or the estimation of artwork. Standing behind this aesthetic is an ideology supported by nearly the entire institutional structure of the Western world — the universities, the publishing houses, the galleries, the journals, the prize committees, the zoning boards. Books that evince a fidelity to modernist principles are the ones that get published. Buildings that conform to the brutal codes of modernism and its derivatives are the ones that get built. Whatever creative efforts spring from other sources of inspiration other than modernist aggression are invariably ignored and dismissed as something antiquated or reactionary. This is the great totalitarian system of our times — the dictatorship of modernism.

Of course, the reign of modernism has been with us for over a century, and its domination has developed over a long period of time. At this point, it has been around long enough to propagate its own rules and standards as it institutionalized its strategy for survival and dominance. It has been around long enough to establish its own canon of “classics.” In short, it has by now developed into its own distinct tradition. Because contemporary artistic production — whether in the field of literature, architecture, music, or the plastic arts — is so obviously inferior to what has been produced before, proponents of modernism generally aver that modernism per se belongs to the early part of the twentieth century, that the creative world has since moved beyond modernism into a “post-modernist” phase, then beyond even that, and thus any criticism of contemporary art is irrelevant to the period of “high modernism.” But this clever strategy pretends to miss the fact that the vast majority of developments since modernism retain its essential negation of complex order. Any evolution of types and forms that has occurred since the period of “high modernism” have applied merely on a superficial level, but the essential ideological core of artistic practice remains the same. The modernists’ tradition of negation still rules over us.

In one respect, this seems like a remarkable development, since arguably the dominant impetus behind the advent of modernism was the rejection of tradition. Whether heard in Ezra Pound’s admonition to “make it new,” or the credo of the Bauhaus to “start from zero,” the desire to break free from what the modernists regarded as the confining strictures of the West’s artistic legacy was obviously an overriding goal and motive of the movement. In a manner too obviously analogous to the totalitarian political regimes of the twentieth century, the modernists endeavored to create an art that would be entirely free of any indebtedness to the past, best captured in the noxious appeal of Alfred Jarry to “destroy the ruins.” That such a virulently “anti-traditional” movement has coagulated into its own tradition must appear paradoxical.

In fact, though, the transformation of modernism into its own discrete tradition can hardly be surprising to anyone who has reflected upon the nature of artistic production. Practical rationality dictates that all artistic creation is law-like, entailing as it does the selection of certain means to achieve certain ends. Artistic traditions emerge over time when any number of artists, under common influences, employ generally similar means to achieve generally shared ends, and thus, consciously or unconsciously, create their artifacts according to the same laws. It is thus impossible for the work of any like-minded artists, working in sympathy with one another, not to develop into a tradition, marked by allegiance to its own laws. If the rules inherent in one tradition are abandoned or proscribed, another set of rules will replace it. Thus we find that the modernists, in breaking all the rules of harmonious composition, in turn generated a set of rigid rules that are simply the opposite of the rules they replaced, rules that guarantee that complex coherence is permanently denied. They began as wild revolutionists, and have ended in our own time as the most stolid conventionalists, and only someone entirely ignorant of art and human nature would have guessed things would turn out any differently.

We see, for example, that contemporary prize-winning architects slavishly copy the same industrial aesthetic originally approved by the Bauhaus, whose members were working for the German industry to sell the industrial products of that time: steel, plate glass, and concrete. Those buildings perform terribly in all climates and are dysfunctional for most human activities inside and in their immediate external vicinity, yet so-called “starchitects” continue to emulate the rules embodied in those failed examples. Alleged artists like Damien Hirst and Cindy Sherman still recycle basically the same pranks first played on the public by Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists almost a century ago. Poets like Geoffrey Hill and John Ashberry continue to cultivate the same arcane diction, comprised of disjointed syntax and esoteric reference, which was employed by purported “high modernists” like Pound and Wallace Stevens. In every case, whether they acknowledge it or not — whether they realize it or not — the most notable creators in our times repeatedly display their fidelity to the rules imposed by modernist ideology.

As soon as we inquire into the nature of these rules, we discover that they are opposed in almost every way to the principles of artistic creation prevailing in the world prior to the end of the nineteenth century. Of course, no one would suggest that prior to the era of modernism, artists all adhered to one monolithic tradition, or that there are not important and irreconcilable differences between, say, the tradition of Gothic cathedral architecture and the tradition of Islamic sacred architecture, or between the neo-classicism of a Pope and the Romanticism of a Wordsworth. Nonetheless, one can identify certain very deep underlying similarities among these traditions, which are not common to modernism — which in fact are antithetical to modernism — and thus we may correctly distinguish between pre-modern traditions and the modernist tradition. Whereas earlier traditions of artistic creation embraced symmetry within complexity, modernism has embraced extreme simplicity, dislocation, and imbalance. Whereas earlier traditions sought to bring pleasure to an audience — “to teach and delight,” as Horace’s famous dictum would have it — modern art attempts to “nauseate” or “brutalize” an audience (the terms are from Jacques Barzun’s The Use and Abuse of Art). Whereas pre-modern architecture employed scale and ornament, modern architecture aggressively promotes gigantisms and barrenness. Whereas classical literature was grounded in regular grammar and public imagery, modern literature routinely resorts to distortions of syntax and esotericism.

The tradition of modernism is thus at enmity with the classical and vernacular traditions of art-making at the most fundamental level. And those evolved from the human effort to grasp and engage with the natural environment. Any artist who believes his work can display loyalty to both traditions is fooling himself. Any playwright who believes he can write on the principles implicit in the work of both Sophocles and Beckett, any architect convinced he can design according to the principles underlying the work of both Palladio and Le Corbusier, is in the grips of a delusion, because the work of the latter artists came into the world to be a rejection and negation of the work of the former. An artist must settle a thousand stylistic questions in the course of his labor, but to any artist working in our times, the first and most pregnant question which must be answered before a line can be written or a stone can be laid is this: will I respect and celebrate the life-affirming aspects of human nature (as traditional artists do), or will I reject and condemn human nature, and celebrate its most destructive traits (as modernists and their derivatives do)?

How an artist chooses to answer this question will depend crucially on what sort of conception he entertains of how human beings are connected to life and the cosmos. Artistic styles, and the traditions which perpetuate them, do not emerge from an abyss, but rather grow out of the deep philosophical convictions of their practitioners. There is such a thing as consistency between one’s beliefs and one’s artistic techniques. The artist in our time will therefore need to ask himself what understanding of humankind manifests itself in the parallel strands of classical and vernacular traditions, versus what understanding of humankind manifests itself in the modernist tradition, and which of these understandings best matches his own. He will discover that the prevalence of complex forms among pre-modern artworks bespeaks a conception of liberty bound to a conception of essence — a deep, even unconscious, belief that the limits and strictures of artistic form do not constitute a deprivation of the artist’s freedom, but rather the preconditions for any creative activity at all. Traditional societies produced artifacts and shaped their environment in a way to give maximal sensory and emotional pleasure within the constraints of materials and utility. This action was therapeutic, a means of emotional nourishment akin to and just as necessary as physical nourishment. The order and proportion inhering in these forms demonstrates their creators’ conviction that their work was to be presented to rational creatures, to creatures capable of recognizing order, and moreover, irresistibly attracted to order, according to the ineffable but universal phenomenon of beauty. The constant pursuit of beauty in classical art evinces the similarly profound conviction that the human soul is a thing capable of edification, of being drawn more constantly and more thoroughly towards harmony, and that the making of art is unrivaled in its capacity to further such edification.

To the contrary, modern art betrays a pursuit not of harmony, but of domination — domination of nature, of language, of one’s fellow man. The level of stylistic violence implicit in modernist architecture is extraordinary: overhangs without obvious supports, leaning buildings, extremely sharp edges sticking out to threaten us, glass floors over heights leading to vertigo, tilted interior walls also leading to vertigo and nausea. Look at the horizontal windows of modernist buildings that violate the vertical axis defined by gravity, or the “brutalist” exposed concrete in dangerously rough surfaces — a violence against the tactile environment, often falsely excused as being “honest” rather than a sadistic architectural expression. The “milder” forms of this violence are represented in minimalist environments devoid of all signs of life: totally blank walls, windowless façades, curtain glass walls, buildings as cubes of glass, buildings as cubes of smooth concrete, etc. Indeed, the subtlety that earlier attempted to camouflage this intrinsic violence has finally been abandoned, and buildings are now built as if blown apart, dismembered, and their forms melted. Consider also the jarring disjunctions of meaning and sense in modernist poetic lines like Hart Crane’s “Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift / Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars, / Beading thy path--condense eternity” or Geoffrey Hill’s “Vehemencies minus the ripe arraignment / Clapper this art taken to heart the fiction / What are those harsh cryings astrew the marshes / Weep not to hear them.” Such passages constitute an assault on the normal conventions of linguistic usage and discursive thought, which is why Jacques Maritain claimed that the poetry of his age “endeavors to get free from the intelligible or logical sense itself,” that it represented “a process of liberation from conceptual, logical, discursive reason.” Or consider the deformations of the human form in painters from Picasso onwards, or worse, the displays of body parts with or without fresh blood, excrement, anything that is disgusting and revolting to our physiological systems, all of which, as Ortega y Gasset claimed, “betray a real loathing of living forms or forms of living beings.” Through this stylistic violence, modernism pursues not an edification of man’s rational nature, but rather an exaltation of his unqualified will. And behind it all is nothing but despair, betrayed by the total absence of beauty, which signifies these artists’ complete inability to imagine any reality transcending the calamitous ugliness of the modern world....

[John]

This article effectively describes our times and gives rationale for Harold Bloom's name for our times as "The Chaotic Period".

I decry the wholesale acceptance of ugliness, barrenness, and "brutalism" as lofty ideals. As a culture, have we caved to the bankruptcy of the great and spacious building, which I propose may have been designed by Corbusier and his minions?

And lest we assume that barrenness and chaos are antithetical, I would propose that nowhere would a person's mind become more chaotic than in an inescapable 8x10 cell with barren walls.

The article's time frame for these corruptions also parallel the rise of modern "popular music" as well. Who can argue that "brutalism" and "gigantism" and "violence" are not inherent in rock music even when it feigns tenderness? A microphone is a brutish instrument and we are inured to the gigantism of ubiquitous amplification.

I wonder if a defense of the modern is perhaps a mask for the fear of the world and those who will point their stylish fingers at us. Do I have the courage to really see and think for myself? Or, rather, am I too cowed by what is currently popular? I fear that I have, in certain ways, succumbed to the mockery of mammon. Am I alone?

[Steve]

After visiting the link and reading the essay in its entirety, I really have to tip my hat to the authors. I felt it was well-written rhetoric and I agree with much of what they said. Responding to my comments with such an essay, though, shows me that I'm not being understood by my audience when I write. It would seem that some of you interpret my enthusiasm for cleanliness, tidiness, order, and open space to be implicit manifestations of a penchant for "windowless façades," "leaning buildings," or "domination of nature." It is a tragedy, I think, that a person should equate "clean and tidy" with "stylistic violence," and it would provoke a similar outrage in me were I to be accused of holding ties with a medieval inquisition because I profess Christianity.

Just because someone rejects the swarming clutter of late baroque sensibilities in their homes doesn't make them a disciple of Ezra Pound. And at any rate, our discussion to this point was not focused so much on the architectural, interior design, or adornment preferences of its participants as it was simply on tidiness and order. If tidying be numbered among the qualities of the conquering modernist hoards, then yes, I suppose I have surrendered to that indiscretion. If the rejection of excess be a vice, then I would like to be counted among the chief offenders. I think these are good things. But that does not mean that I break bread with the techno-scientific-anti-traditional charlatans who "reject and condemn human nature" with their craft.

Hmm, I'm not even sure how we reached this point in the conversation. We were just talking about picking up after ourselves and avoiding excess. Maybe we should move the discussion to a proper thread before we carry this any further?

[Ian]

funny that you would associate le corbusier with the great and spacious building, which "stood as it were in the air."

[Ian]

i thought the essay flowed naturally from the conversation. the authors state: "Books that evince a fidelity to modernist principles are the ones that get published." marie kondo is not only published, but highly popular. you keep bringing up cleanliness, but seems to me that this is really about minimalism.

[Steve]

The interpretation of "minimalism" is being used to accuse those who appreciate some of its purer principles as being heretics of a sort. Dad brings up serving mammon, which James E. Talmage describes in part as being "eager to amass plenty." A desire to reduce one's possessions in order to maximize time for relationships and other essentials is hardly worthy of vilification. There is indeed all sorts of folly being preached under the "minimalist" banner as greedy and ill-meaning scoundrels convince thousands to abandon one false ideology for another, but let's isolate the folly from the calls for simplicity and intentional living.



PS - Wouldn't want to live there, but I think it has some beautiful features.

[John]

Your reasons for not wanting to live there might be germane. As a passageway, I can appreciate the beauty of the colors and surface finishes, but if this what the whole house is like, ...yikes.

And pardon. No vilification has been intended.

[James]

I've seen in the internet connections claims that there is a link between high levels of intelligence and thriving in clutter.

I tend to go in bursts. I will get an urge to tidy and quite enjoy the work of cleaning and organizing. Later on I will have no motivation to clean and feel quite cozy in clutter.
I agree that children's space, like the design studio I will soon occupy, should be more cluttered with papers, blocks, toys, etc.

I like the way Louis Khan plays with brutalism (béton brut)
Also I enjoy the way Rem Koolhaas deals with modernism and urbanism

[Betsy]

Oh! I haven't noticed this thread until today.

I've read this book!

I mostly skimmed over all the lengthy comments so far in this thread.... But the "how many books" debate is something that Micah and I are currently discussing, and I tend to agree that there is such a thing as too many books, but also think there should be an abundance in the home. I go between minimalism and "maximalism" in my design aesthetic. I don't necessarily want my house designed just like the temple, but I want a "house of order" because I notice that I just focus better in an environment that doesn't distract.

That said, I never judge a person by the state of their home. I have been to many places where hoarding is extremely apparent. From a clinical viewpoint, hoarding is one of the signs of depression (Micah can correct me if I'm wrong) but if I express in any way that another person besides myself needs to "tidy up", that suggestion usually is met with resistance. Rather, like Marie Kondo suggests, you just work with your own things and let others do what they want with theirs. This is a very strong point in the book that I did not expect to find. And why I think the book has caused somewhat of a revolution. I see it as more of a de-stigmatization of mental health, rather than a push for a minimalist lifestyle.

[Ian]

it's about time someone started a mental health de-stigmatization revolution, and who better than marie kondo?

[Betsy]

[Steve]

Additional stats for what they're worth:

1. There are 300,000 items in the average American home (LA Times).

2. The average size of the American home has nearly tripled in size over the past 50 years (NPR).

3. And still, 1 out of every 10 Americans rent offsite storage—the fastest growing segment of the commercial real estate industry over the past four decades. (New York Times Magazine).

4. While 25% of people with two-car garages don’t have room to park cars inside them and 32% only have room for one vehicle. (U.S. Department of Energy).

5. The United States has upward of 50,000 storage facilities, more than five times the number of Starbucks. Currently, there is 7.3 square feet of self storage space for every man, woman and child in the nation. Thus, it is physically possible that every American could stand—all at the same time—under the total canopy of self storage roofing (SSA).

6. British research found that the average 10-year-old owns 238 toys but plays with just 12 daily (The Telegraph).

7. 3.1% of the world’s children live in America, but they own 40% of the toys consumed globally (UCLA).

8. The average American woman owns 30 outfits—one for every day of the month. In 1930, that figure was nine (Forbes).

9. The average American family spends $1,700 on clothes annually (Forbes).

10. While the average American throws away 65 pounds of clothing per year (Huffington Post).

11. Nearly half of American households don’t save any money (Business Insider).

12. But our homes have more television sets than people. And those television sets are turned on for more than a third of the day—eight hours, 14 minutes (USA Today).

13. Some reports indicate we consume twice as many material goods today as we did 50 years ago (The Story of Stuff).

14. Currently, the 12 percent of the world’s population that lives in North America and Western Europe account for 60 percent of private consumption spending, while the one-third living in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 3.2 percent (Worldwatch Institute).

15. Americans donate 1.9% of their income to charitable causes (NCCS/IRS). While 6 billion people worldwide live on less than $13,000/year (National Geographic).

16. Americans spend more on shoes, jewelry, and watches ($100 billion) than on higher education (Psychology Today).

17. Shopping malls outnumber high schools. And 93% of teenage girls rank shopping as their favorite pastime (Affluenza).

18. Women will spend more than eight years of their lives shopping (The Daily Mail).

19. Over the course of our lifetime, we will spend a total of 3,680 hours or 153 days searching for misplaced items.The research found we lose up to nine items every day—or 198,743 in a lifetime. Phones, keys, sunglasses, and paperwork top the list (The Daily Mail).

20. Americans spend $1.2 trillion annually on nonessential goods—in other words, items they do not need (The Wall Street Journal).

21. The $8 billion home organization industry has more than doubled in size since the early 2000’s—growing at a staggering rate of 10% each year (Uppercase).