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     Spent the afternoon  cleaning up and putting things in
order in our garage. Making progress, but not finished yet. I
derive a kind of esthetic satisfaction from the project,
provided I don't feel that I must meet a deadline, or that I
should really be doing something more important. Two hundred
years ago, neatness, cleanliness and order were recognized as
virtues, moral virtues. No longer. Nowadays we claim a quasi-
constitutional right to be messy, uncouth and vulgar.

     As I scrutinize tools and materials that I acquired
twenty, thirty, forty years ago, I recognize them as
irreplacable reminders of the past, memories of events that
would be inaccessible but for these museum pieces.
Paradoxically, the more disreputable and shabby the junk, the
more engaging the memories that it evokes.  I am incurably
sentimental.

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Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
