America loves Marie Kondo, a self-help author and lifestyle guru who has exploited people’s insecurities (and our culture’s dark codependent relationship with disposable consumer goods) in order to become enormously rich. If you have somehow missed the fuss about Kondo, she wrote a book called “The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing”, which is typical cultish self-help waffle about how you should throw all of your things away, paint your walls white, and fold your few remaining textiles with chilling robotic precision. Kondo has leveraged her success into a “brand” and now appears on Netflix, going through people’s lives and discarding everything that does not “spark joy.” In one recent episode, she caused great anxiety to intellectuals and bibliophiles when she applied her methodology to book collections. In her worldview, unread books should be discarded, as should books which you wish to read again, but are not presently reading. Kondo said that her ideal library was, at most, thirty books. If there are parts of a book you love, you should cut out the relevant pages and throw away the rest (although it seems this may have been an experimental Kondo methodology which didn’t work out even for her).
As you can imagine, these ridiculous & harmful ideas have caused book-lovers (and idea-lovers) to become apoplectic. The history of people who destroy books or encourage their elimination is not very splendid or happy. It is hard not to elide Kondo’s claptrap with some of these sad episodes. Fortunately for Kondo, there are few intellectuals and booklovers in contemporary society, but there are legions of people who are angry in one way or another about identity politics. To the eyes of these Kondo apologists, the scholars and bibliophiles spluttering indignantly about the importance of books or whatever are racists who are lashing out at a successful Asian-American woman because of her wealth and influence. As with everything in America in 2019, the entire episode has made everyone furious and left all parties looking bad.
In Kondo’s defense, I can sympathize with how difficult it is to create new material every day. If you are forced to continuously churn stuff out, sometimes your material is not always terribly good. It is all too easy to say or do stupid things. That is one of the reasons we throw things away. Indeed, I haven’t watched the offending episode, but have only read about it. Maybe she was tossing out shelves of Dilbert cartoon books, Ayn Rand novels, or 1850s books about the glories of colonialism and slavery. Since the show is about people appealing to her for help, she might have been throwing away hundreds of tendentious self-help books!
Also to her credit, Kondo identifies the information inside the book as the important part, and admonishes us not to idolatrously love unread books for their own sake or use them as props.
But, and this is the critical part: it is unclear how one would ever extract this knowledge if they discarded the book before reading it. The things that “spark joy” in my life right now are different from the ones that will spark joy in my life a year from now. When I was growing up, my parents had mysterious and compelling shelves of books from their college days. Every day I walked past the diseased eye on the cover of Camus’ “The Plague” and wondered what was going on in that book. Looking at the troubling dissection on “Gray’s Anatomy”, the dandy on “Vanity Fair”, the strange Van der Weyden portrait on “Masterpieces of the National Gallery” and the magnificent sperm whale on “Moby Dick” made me curious about the contents of those books too. Sometimes I would pick them up and try to understand them. Eventually I picked them up and read them. If my parents had thrown those books away, maybe I would have found them later and read them on my own, or maybe not. Maybe I never would have become as interested in reading to begin with.
Also, books are our cultural heritage. “Moby Dick” was universally unloved when it first came out in 1851. It took 70 years before it found success. What if 1890s Marie Kondo (I am sure there was an analogous busybody) had come along and thrown away the copy that caused a critic to love it and rescue it from obscurity. Books are not knick-knacks or ill-used toiletries, they are bigger and have bigger meanings which are not immediately evident. Kondo seemingly fails to understand or acknowledge this. Also I love books! Imagine if some third party went into Marie Kondo’s life and started throwing away the things she cares about most (dollars & followers) until she only had thirty of each left: I bet she would be pretty dissatisfied.
Beyond these obvious and cursory points about the nature of writing and thinking, Kondo’s insistence on shoveling this tripe into our face right now so she can become richer and more important speaks to the nature of now (when every business is busy making shortsighted decisions in order to maximize profits and our leaders are clinging to power even if it causes the republic to founder.). Her unwise advice also increases our country’s dangerous love affair with anti-intellectualism, a perennial scourge, which, in the Trump era, is becoming a threat to the continued existence of the nation.
I have been meaning to write about Kondo as part of a larger polemic against minimalism (an undying aesthetic movement from the 21st century which is not just ugly, but which is morally injuring us). However, the fact that Marie Kondo is apparently openly attacking knowledge itself, temporarily derailed my anti-minimalist essay. We need to defend literature and the accumulated knowledge of humankind against the ridiculous menace of the gentle Japanese art of throwing everything away (or whatever this crap is called). Don’t worry though, I haven’t forgotten my original point and we will get to minimalism and oversimplification tomorrow some time next week. Events on the ground complicated my plans (because the world is complicated and not simple).
ferrebeekeeper 
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January 17, 2019 at 11:54 AM
writingverbaboutwritingnoun
I think this is rather hyperbolic – I don’t think Marie Kondo is anti-knowledge (it could be argued that instead she just wants us to think more about what we own and why) and while you may not agree with her minimalist agenda it hardly has the ideological potency of book-burning. Obviously different people have different ideas about how their possessions make them feel and whether they prefer a full or empty home. While I would generally agree that possessions can’t make me happy, I would be upset if someone insisted I threw my books out – but in a society which is so full of wastefulness and overconsumption, Kondo’s approach provides a useful alternative, I think.
January 17, 2019 at 3:46 PM
Wayne
Thanks for the comment. My post might be a touch hyberbolic…I started writing it in red fury based on articles I saw on the internet, but then Kondo’s view seemed to grow slightly more nuanced as I proceeded. Still, the image of her treating books like any other disposable plastic widget rubs me the wrong way. Disdain for thinking and writing (and love of oversimplification) are already such prominent features of American society, that we don’t need some lame celebrity making the problem worse. Whatever OCD thing it is which she represents seems like the opposite side of the same coin as unhealthy consumerism anyway. A lot of her supporters say, “why are people picking on Kondo? if you don’t like her, don’t pay attention.” Yet cultural touchstones do matter. I’m chucking her in the same bin with clean diets, standing desks, small houses, and other annoying, faintly-moralizing trends. Then I am going to slide that bin into a dank corner of the basement and forget about it.
January 18, 2019 at 3:59 PM
Benjamin Miller
I’m not sure how different books are from other physical possessions, many of which carry and convey their own stories and meaning throughout one’s life (and one’s children’s lives). Granted, as an antiques dealer, I’m professionally obligated to hold that view. And I’ve seen enough hoarding to know that there are limits. But I would caution against interpreting Kondo’s “spark joy” idea too narrowly. Many things that seemed dull yesterday are potent today.
January 22, 2019 at 10:18 PM
Wayne
Thanks Ben. Objects do indeed have their own stories. Some of these are evident in the object itself. Thus a clever curator can discover how and when as piece was manufactured, the way it was used, or why it was damaged/repaired/what-have-you…but other stories and layers of meaning are all too easily divorced from the objects. When I worked at a history museum, the accession histories and recorded tales of the objects were nearly as important as the pieces in the collection. I suspect the first lady’s dresses would be thrown out as dirty scraps of moldering fabric by anybody who found them unlabeled while cleaning an attic. Which is to say there is a meta-layer of meaning to written things which other objects–no matter how precious or exquisite–don’t necessarily have by themselves (although they can have other strengths, as I am sure a treasure dealer such as yourself knows!). Writing is the ultimate way of keeping and tracking the meanings as they change.
Discarding writings removes this whole history and eliminates the record of back-and-forth social contextualization. I worry that the careless handling of books and written goods will not just cause writings to be lost, but will further cause people to be less thoughtful about ideas, meanings, and history. Most of my teachers growing up demanded that books be respected and not handled carelessly or discarded and I am starting to think there was more than public school penury behind this demand. It was a moralistic imperative to respect literacy and scholarly thinking so that subsequent generations had the opportunity to make informed decisions about how to judge things.
Obviously throwing away all of the torn-up Stephen King and Robert Jordon paperbacks isn’t going to bankrupt civilization’s literary heritage, but Kondo is on a slippery slope and I am not going to let her off the hook yet. You shouldn’t either–she is probably out there tossing silver epergnes and salt cellars in a dumpster as we speak!
February 14, 2019 at 4:34 PM
Jennifer
This is hilarious, and you’ll be surprised to know I agree. Nevertheless, I’ve read her book twice, and the advice is useful for broken appliances, socks with holes, and other junk we leave lying around out of some misguided and belated effort at thrift.
February 14, 2019 at 11:58 PM
Wayne
Thank you for the comment (and for finally reading this). I like your idea that her advise is for junk, but does not apply to items of cultural, literary, or scientific merit. But does this mean I need to throw away all my socks with holes? That is ALL of my socks!