After an earlier image, Namibian cleanliness was briefly discussed. Yes, there's littering here, but most sidewalks are generally clean, with trash cans everywhere, even along thinly traversed stretches. The private homes I've seen are also clean. Here is the kitchen of Joanna, the just fired teacher. Even with no running water and electricity cut off, her kitchen is still clean and neat.
3 comments:
Cleanliness and orderliness are a sure sign of discipline, it shows/proves you're not a lazy SOB unwilling to do the bare minimum to improve your own life, your own personal space, your world.
In Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, there's this remarkable passage about order in disorder:
Many a time, at the end of a working day, Janine would talk to me about Flaubert’s view of the world, in her office where there were such quantities of lecture notes, letters and other documents lying around that it was like standing amidst a flood of paper. On the desk, which was both the origin and the focal point of this amazing profusion of paper, a virtual paper landscape had come into being in the course of time, with mountains and valleys. Like a glacier when it reaches the sea, it had broken off at the edges and established new deposits all around on the floor, which in turn were advancing imperceptibly towards the centre of the room. Years ago, Janine had been obliged by the ever-increasing masses of paper on her desk to bring further tables into use, and these tables, where similar processes of accretion had subsequently taken place, represented later epochs, so to speak, in the evolution of Janine’s paper universe. The carpet, too, had long since vanished beneath several inches of paper; indeed, the paper had begun climbing from the floor, on which, year after year, it had settled, and was now up the walls as high as the top of the door frame, page upon page of memoranda and notes pinned up in multiple layers, all of them by just one corner. Wherever it was possible there were piles of papers on the books on her shelves as well. It once occurred to me that at dusk, when all of this paper seemed to gather into itself the pallor of the fading light, it was like the snow in the fields, long ago, beneath the ink-black sky. In the end Janine was reduced to working from an easychair drawn more or less into the middle of her room where, if one passed her door, which was always ajar, she could be seen bent almost double scribbling on a pad on her knees or sometimes just lost in thought. Once when I remarked that sitting there amidst her papers she resembled the angel in Dürer’s Melancholia, steadfast among the instruments of destruction, her response was that the apparent chaos surrounding her represented in reality a perfect kind of order, or an order which at least tended towards perfection. And the fact was that whatever she might be looking for amongst her papers or her books, or in her head, she was generally able to find right away.
"And the fact was that whatever she might be looking for amongst her papers or her books, or in her head, she was generally able to find right away."
Then her system works and, as long as her gigantic pile of papers doesn't spread to another's territory and become their problem, so be it.
I'm a lot messier than my wife who is a cleanliness/orderliness fanatic. That said, whenever she straightens out my stuff, which is all the time, I can't find anything.
Post a Comment