These for walls

Image of Milan Kundera by Adolph Hoffmeister (1968)

There's a book by Milan Kundera about a character who feels that her identity is defined by the things that she surrounded herself with -- things such as:
her cat, certain photographs, books, clothes, records that she painstakingly accrued -- that all of thee things were deliberate clues about her inner life and self.

The character's sister on the other hand believed that the external was irrelevant and her essence was completely divorced from her physical belongings or surroundings.

I read this book approximately, um...let's just say several years ago -- around the time I had just graduated from high school...grudgingly moving onto college and so on. Wide eyed and full of whatever you're full of at that moment I moved into my first apartment or "flat" for you English folk.

Perhaps the checks still had mom and dad's signatures in them, but it was nonetheless my own personal and private space.

But I digress...
I found myself now with the lone and self supplying responsibilty of decorating and adorning this new place exactly how I wanted, without fear of reprimand from parents or school officials, certainly any professional help.

The book still fresh in my head, I couldn't help but think of Kundera's "first sister." Belongings seemed so important, almost defining and shaping of her way of figuring out who she was and where she fit in the world.

Thinking it was only a book, and knowing the kind of creep I am, I felt a bit superior to this fictional character and the notion that material objects could define me. If years of good school, strong role models, and cable television couldn't get a word in edgewise, there was no way a poster or armoir were going to spell me out.

My identity is so not idefined by an accumulation of THINGS, (uh junk really if you consider where most of these things have been found).

I fully appropriated the second sister's philosophy: I looked down my nose at friends or rather posers who seemed so concerned with buying just the right albums, the right clothes, the right pictures or posters to plaster their places with.

I actually kind of felt a little sorry for them too because it all seemed like a weak, simplistic, fumbling attempt to create a ready-made personality. "I'm the kind of girl who listens to Sixties mod, reads Martin Amis, brushes my teeth with Tom's of Maine." It was lazy conformity.

BLEH.

For the first two years that I lived there, I made it a point to keep my walls bare and make sure books and cd's were not prominently displayed. I hated the idea that someone could just walk into my room and feel they got a sense of who I was merely by glancing at the trash I kept around.

It sounds pretentious and dumb...AND IT WAS!

After a while, the design aesthetic of my living space was not so much rooted in philosophical conviction as in laziness. I never bothered to frame or hang the lovely Frank Lloyd Wright wrapping paper my mother got me as a gift. I had no pictures of family or friends, no artwork, no band posters, nothing. My walls were completely blank, and they were ugly.

The walls in my place these days? Heh.

Well, at least I keep a kind of lazy blog right?