On Moving

Also: The tribute album, on housekeeping, endangered crafts, Flaubert’s sex, and more.

Source: U-Haul

We are in the process of moving—again. This time we are simply downsizing from a large 3,000-square-foot home to something about half the size. All four kids are now out of the house for good (or so we assume), and we neither need the space nor care to keep it up (see Clare Coffey below on housekeeping).

Moving once again made me recall a piece I wrote for The Weekly Standard back in the day on the topic:

We’ve moved for a variety of reasons and in almost every way—by air, land, and sea. We’ve rented both U-Haul and Penske trucks—from a short 12-footer to a 26-foot Freightliner with attached trailer—for drives across town and across the Southeast. We’ve moved by boat, shipping our affairs internationally three times. One time, when our lease was up in a neighborhood we liked, we rented the house across the street and simply carried everything over by foot. When we moved from Connecticut to North Carolina and found we couldn’t afford to rent a truck, we sold all of our second-hand furniture and shipped the few items we wanted to keep by UPS.

I wish I could say I’ve learned something profound about moving, but carrying banana boxes of books down slippery stairs or driving an overloaded truck with hot brakes down a mountain doesn’t exactly put one in a philosophic state of mind. Seneca is probably right when he tells Lucilius that we travel because we think a change of place will change us for the better. It doesn’t. “Though you may cross vast spaces of sea,” he writes, “your faults will follow you whithersoever you travel.” Moving usually adds a few.

Here’s the kicker: “What I have learned is that most practical moving advice is, at best, only partially right. BuzzFeed posted an article a few years ago offering ‘33 Moving Tips That Will Make Your Life So Much Easier.’ This is the first mistake: believing that you can do anything to make moving easier or that there is such a thing as a ‘smooth move.’ There’s not.”

So far, this move has been—knock on wood—relatively smooth. It’s just the two of us, which makes it slower, but it is decidedly less complicated to move without children (no offense, kids) than with them.

We spent the weekend (after I attended yet another commencement) breaking down tables, packing, and taking stuff to the storage unit—actually, storage units. We thought we could get by with one. I, in fact, was supremely confident we could. The thing had 12-foot ceilings, and I was planning on stacking precariously balanced lamps and half-opened boxes of spices to the very top. In the end, we’ll be lucky to fit everything in two—and not three—units. How did we accumulate so much stuff?

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In other news, the painter Frank Stella has died. He was 87. He was good friends with my late dissertation director, the poet and critic Robert Rehder. The cover of Robert’s last collection of poetry before he died, First Things When, uses a Stella painting, and Robert wrote several poems based on Stella’s work. One was on Stella’s Untitled (Study for Getty’s Tomb), which Robert owned.