![]() ![]() And yet, for the most part, these are not books concerned merely with tidying and decluttering one’s house. By my estimate, more than 50 titles released in 2016 concerned tidying and decluttering. A brief visit to Amazon reveals a sub-genre which is booming. Even so, mess, despite its dishevelled devotees, is losing the battle all indications are that tidy is asking for our support – and we’re giving it.Ī number of people I know are finding it difficult to repress talk of the ‘life-changing magic’ of their tidying, of the power of ‘decluttering,’ of stripping their lives – or perhaps just their sock drawer (it’s sometimes hard to tell) – back to ‘the essentials’. Einstein’s famous retort: ‘If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?’ Untidy people have since resolved to seek to correlate their own mess with their genius with varying levels of success. Part of the handed down mythos framing Einstein’s genius was that he was chided at Princeton by his Dean about the untidiness of his office: ‘A cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind,’ the Dean is reported to have said. We shouldn’t forget that mess, as a minor tradition, also has its adherents, its champions, and its characteristic romance. We’re even now being told by some people that it’s a sign of sound mental health. Neatness, we’re told all around, is a sign of care and maturity, of respecting visitors, of ‘making an effort’ neatness is a sign of clarity, organisation, and efficiency. And while we are no longer Futurists, we have taken up one of its central imperatives. With dustless, metal streets and myriad other assaults on earth’s untidy organic matter, the future the Futurists dreamed of was a site where everything both had its place and was in it. Words such as ‘order’ and ‘clean’ and verbal phrases like ‘cleaning up’ and ‘clearing out’ are reiterated like mantras in the writings of Marinetti and his shiny-helmeted associates. Manifestos of tidy sometimes come from unlikely places, and may emerge in the literature of the avant-garde just as easily as they do in Life Strategies by Dr Phil.įew modern movements subscribed to the credo of ‘neat, clean, and tidy’ more earnestly than the Italian Futurists did. ![]() But sometimes the advocates of tidy get more motivated, more organised, more sympathetic to pamphleteering and the distribution of manifestos. Mostly the imperative has been handed on as part of an oral tradition – of childhood encouragements, cautionary tales, and admonishments. It is hard for me to be neutral about tidy.īecause tidiness, of course, isn’t just about how things might be or currently are – it’s about how things should be. My year master said my handwriting looked like that of ‘a child pretending to write while still not really knowing the alphabet’. It’s now hard to comprehend how this is even possible. In high school, I almost failed geography on neatness grounds alone. (My own attempts to do this had repeatedly failed, and I reliably ruined books with my incapacity to ever lay flat the adhesive plastic.) But my early-year resolutions were always undone I would revert to my old ways, eroding my resolution one dishevelled act at a time. I was the boy whose pants would tirelessly eject his shirttails, the boy with a bird-nest bouffant, with long, dirty nails at the end of inky blue hands, carrying a time capsule school bag filled with crumbs, crayon particles, and buttered cling wrap.Įvery year I’d buy new highlighters and coloured folders and get my friends to cover all of the new schoolbooks in ConTact. Even after its recent demographic realignment, its martinetish overtones remain, and I am duly haunted. But this has changed, and the word is now doing good trade among my peers. Rather, it was a term – usually a verb, sometimes a noun or an adjective – used by adults to address children, who were directed to tidy their rooms or desks, or to make themselves look ‘neat and tidy’ for someone or something. Until recently, my sense was that ‘tidy’ wasn’t a word much used in adult conversation. ![]()
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