Typing at my desk is a hazardous business.
Two inches to my right there’s a teetering pile of old books. Not the books with impressive titles that I place in prominent positions around my room. Just a pile of old books. They should go to charity. But I use them as a paperweight, you see. They’re keeping a selection of receipts in place, along with faded Post-it notes and takeaway menus for closed restaurants. To my left is an army of mugs, holding varying quantities of cold coffee. One is almost empty, so a perfect container for dried-up ballpoint pens and a sandcastle flag.
I’m also considering a trip to the doctor, because it’s now official: hoarding can be a serious health risk. Richard Wallace – Channel 4’s Obsessive Compulsive Hoarder, whose mountains of newspapers, milk bottles and tyres could be seen from Google Earth – is currently undergoing treatment.
His case is obviously an extreme one. If your house contains more than 100 tonnes of junk – or more than two books by Jeffrey Archer – then something probably is wrong. The inability to throw things away can have all sorts of complex emotional roots. In fact, as someone who hoards mostly out of laziness, I probably shouldn’t be quite so flippant.
All the same, it sometimes feels as if we’re moving too fervently in the other direction, towards a completely clutter-free culture. Switch on the TV and you’re likely to be confronted by either a terrifyingly immaculate kitchen or programmes with names like How Clean Is Your House? or I Was Crushed By My Own Stamp Collection, which present those who live untidily as a kind of freak show. The crusade against mess-makers has entered the workplace, too. It was recently reported that in-trays have been banned from the Tatler offices because, according to the editor, “receptacles encourage hoarding”.
But then, the contents of Tatler – a glossy shrine to the Delevingne sisters – might also answer a conundrum posed by the reckless hoarder and occasional theoretical physicist Albert Einstein: “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”
A room without mess is a room without interest. I want the human clues – whether someone can be trusted with a full glass of red wine, say, or whether they know how to make origami out of crisp packets. Thanks to Kindles and iPods, it’s already much harder to form irreversible judgments about people based on the books, magazines and CDs littering their homes.
Some of the best arguments for untidiness, though, are to be found in the arts. The novelist Iris Murdoch managed to write dozens of books in a house that “turned squalor into an art form”, while the writer Quentin Crisp defended his sub-Withnail housekeeping skills by pointing out that “after the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse”. It was said of Percy Bysshe Shelley that, “In order to analyse the mystery of creation”, he had “endeavoured first to re-create primeval chaos” in his bedroom. I’m conflicted about mentioning Tracey Emin’s notorious bed here, because it makes my point but I don’t actually like it much (perhaps I’m not such a free spirit after all).
It may be that these people were successful because they didn’t waste time on such trivial things as basic hygiene. But new research from Germany suggests that clutter can actually motivate people to simplify their thoughts, leading to more creative work.
So maybe I won’t get rid of those old books after all. But I won’t hold my breath for that Nobel Prize, either.
More Orlando:
...on parody
...on vegetarianism
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