A cluttered life

While attending three years of law school, I lived in an unfinished basement of a rather squalid house on Brooklyn Avenue, in Seattle's University District.  A friend and I shared the basement the first year.  Without really thinking about what I was doing, I helped demarcate my territory from our common areas by piling each day's newspapers in such a way as to increase my privacy.

After three years, the stacks of newspapers had become enormous.  Moving out required more labor than it did for most university students. 

But this episode in my life was remarkable only for its extremity.  Throughout childhood, I saved all my school papers in dresser drawers.  I remember, as a high school student, looking back with pleasure on my spelling grades from second grade.  My basement today is full of debris, although a significant weeding out occurred in 2009, when my house was taken over for use as a movie set, and again in 2014, when my brother "helped with" (did) some major renovations.

Just visiting my house, you'd never guess I was a hoarder if you didn't see the basement, perhaps.  Perhaps, but -- suspiciously -- all my walls are lined with books, books from every period of my life.  I've occasionally thrown out a guide book or two that was thirty years out of date.  It hurt. 

And let's not even talk about my desk top during my many years in legal practice.  Luckily, I had a series of highly organized secretaries who tried to impose some order on my disorderliness.

All of this came to mind as I read Jan Morris's Manhattan '45, an account and collection of remembrances of what life was like in New York at the conclusion of World War II. 

Morris briefly describes the remarkable Victorian home on Fifth Avenue, near 128th Street, of two brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer.  They had lived in their home in Harlem since 1909, back when it was a fashionable area of town.  Homer had been an admiralty attorney with a degree from Columbia, but had been paralyzed since 1932; he was cared for by his brother Langley, a concert pianist who had performed at Carnegie Hall.

Their story reveals what might have been my fate if I'd continued to live for decades in my Brooklyn Avenue basement.  They gradually filled their home with, well, with debris.  A New York Times story in 2003 states that the house was filled with hundreds of thousands of newspapers.  Morris says that every passage through the house was barricaded with miscellaneous rubbish, with tunnels burrowed through the rubbish through which one had to crawl.  One hundred eighty tons of debris. 

Booby traps had been installed throughout the passages. 

The house had no gas, electric, water, or sewer connections.  But it had fourteen grand pianos and it had an excellent library, specializing in mechanics and the sea.

Homer finally died in 1947.  It took the police two hours to break into the house using axes and crow bars.  No one had any idea what had happened to Langley.  His body was discovered three weeks later, caught in one of his own booby traps, buried under debris, and partially eaten by rats.

Langley was not only paralyzed, but blind.  His brother had saved the newspapers for him to read when he recovered his sight.  The other garbage?  Who knows.  The Times quoted a writer as saying that eccentrics are not necessarily illogical.  They may have their own "very pure" logic.  It's just different.

The Times writer had heard the Collyer story as a child.

To my 7-year-old ears, the cruel twist was deliciously gruesome: Homer and Langley had been killed by the very bulwarks they had raised to keep the world out of their lives.

A cautionary tale, indeed.  And metaphorical.  A story to recall and ponder in these days when our leaders seem obsessed with the desire to build national bulwarks to keep the outside world outside.