Getting Old, Letting Go

I took all of my Nintendo paraphernalia to GameStop recently and sold the lot. I could almost certainly have gotten more money if I had sold all that cool stuff on line, but I am lazy, I don't want to bother with haggling with people, and I didn't want to be tempted to keep any of it. I became intrigued with The Legend of Zelda several years ago as a sort of exploration in religious history. Zelda has a canon, pseudopigrapha, lore and legend, saints and historians and hagiographers. I found it fascinating to be able to study such an intellectual system that was, being only thirty years old, completely accessible. And, being a hardware junky, I bought several Nintendo consoles and games besides Zelda. Video games are, as not only I am aware, an important part of recent art history.

But, I found myself rather Zelda-ed out. I have been exploring Tamriel lately, the local of the Elderscrolls, rather than Hyrule. I was tempted to keep the Zeldoid devices as a prompt for comparative religious history, but there is so much Zelda material online that it's not really necessary. So, now someone else can enjoy the beautiful hardware that I have so enjoyed. These were things that gave me joy, but which I did not use.

At my age, I can look back over a wide range of collections of beautiful things that I no longer have: telescopes (four); cars (I don't even remember how many); kayaks (16); books (probably around  20,000); pottery (tons--there was a time when often gave sit-down dinners for 30 or more people.) I have friends who are hoarders, who have bits and pieces of as many parts of their past as they can hold onto in closets and shelves and attics and storage units, or scattered around the yard, because those things might be useful again, or because they are connected to important memories. My tendency to buy whole collections of things when I have an interest in a new subject I suppose I copied from my father, who was an avid hobbyist, but with serial hobbies. My ability to let them go must be from my mother, who would haul out almost anything if it wasn't nailed down, and if it was she might call 911 for help prying it loose. Who knows what she did with my telescopes and microscopes that I left at home when I went off to college. (I don't think she had any idea of what I had spent for those wonderful instruments. If she had, I think she would just have thought me foolish, but it probably wouldn't have kept her from clearing them out.)

The GameStop guy asked me, when he told me how little he could offer for my New Nintendo 3DS XL, if I wanted to keep. It was the second one I have bought, I gave the first one away to a kid whom I thought to need it more than I, but then Zelda-nostalgia convinced me to buy another one for at least The Ocarina of Time. I told him no. If I kept it, I would re-buy Majora's Mask, and A Link Between Worlds, and then I would just feel guilty because I didn't play them.  Abstinence is easier than moderation.

What I realize more and more is that I have plenty of stuff, both to enjoy and to do, but I am running out of life. I can buy just about anything I want, except for a Diamond DA 50--and more time. So, letting go of things that I might feel I should use frees me to do things that I enjoy more, that provide more joy now.

There is always a temptation, it seems, to go back. One of my current obsessions is the life and work of Cy Twombly, a painter I found fascinating when I was in high school but who sort of felt off my horizon when I moved to Chicago with the glorious clutter of the artists at the Art Institute.  When Twombly was 66, he began to spend more and more time in his home town of Lexington, Virginia. He did, however, keep exploring new ways to paint.  He seemed to enjoy the comfort of his history in Lexington, but he did not let himself become tied to it.

I am older than Twombly was when he returned to Lexington, and I understand the attraction of the past.  If I had as much money as Twombly, I might go back to the old country and buy a little place so that I could take vacations in the past.  But I don't have enough money, as Twombly did, to keep a place in the past and another couple of places in the present.  However, in the eight years since Twombly died, the internet has expanded fast enough that I can visit, at least visually, the little house I almost bought the last time I revisited the old country.

The house belonged to a woman for whom I worked as a sort of yard- and handyman when I was in high school.  I know how beautiful its rear garden is, with the first French doors and loggia that I ever saw. It was for sale about twenty years ago, and I almost bought it.  But I didn't.  Now I can look at it and be happy that I don't have to keep up the yard.  I can look at it and be happy that I don't have to endure the heat of its summers.  I can look at it and let go of a life that has become as imaginary as Hyrule, as imaginary as the images in Google Street View.  My present life may not be magnificent, but it is enough to keep me surprised each day by all the riches that present themselves.  It is enough to keep me up past my bedtime trying to cram more in each day.  I am at a stage of life and the world is at a stage of history when shell shock is the  pretty much the common condition of us all (Cue Alvin Toffler).  And yet I try to cram more in each day until my heart stops beating. I understand the attraction of the old.  But I also know that the old ain't there any more. Let it go.