Cluttered Desks for Authenticity

“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”

― Albert Einstein

 

For as long as I can remember, I have had a messy side of things – things, because I share things with my sister such as our bedroom, our bedside tables, our closets, and most importantly, our desk. Consider it a form of segregation, which also happens in the backseat of any car – I on the left, and her on the right, always.

My side of the desk has, for as long as we have had a desk, been cluttered. It has been vandalized, chipped into pasted on, blu-tacked and covered in all sorts of pens, accessories, papers, newspaper clippings and notes. Quite recently, it has been home for educational resources, and a photoshopped image of myself standing beside Jack Black. Below Mister Jack Black and I, an illegal green laser, a pair of sunglasses, a glue stick, a Jagermeister collector’s tin with over fifty HB pencils in them, a Harry Potter wand and an X-acto blade, headphones, and Lord knows what else is hidden near or underneath these things.

I have always had a cluttered desk. I would not, however, call it ‘messy’, nor ‘untidy’, nor ‘dirty’. It is certainly not smelly, nor is it sticky, nor will you end up having eraser pieces on your elbows if you sat there for a while. It simply is a home to all my collectibles, all my academic sources and all of my miniscule to-do-lists and not so miniscule booklist. It is now five pages strong, that booklist, and there is more ink than white on those five pages, an ever-growing list of books that I want to own and read.

I got to thinking, though, that perhaps there is a sense of authenticity in a cluttered desk, that mess is more than just junk, that mess implies a want for learning, a display of critical awareness. Like the above quote by Albert Einstein, what does an empty, rather tidy desk signify? To me, a tidy desk signifies the mind of a person who collects bits and pieces from Officeworks, displaying a sense of ownership over a piece of wood and a few journals, and nothing else. Those journals may not ever be written in. Those journals may end up being eaten by the owner’s cat, or dog.

I have thus come to a hypothesis, if you like, wherein I believe that a person whose desk is overly tidy has no room for a cluttered mind, for cluttered thinking, for thinking which suggests thinking itself, rather they look at things in a simplistic manner – whereas a person with a cluttered desk can stand the strains of cluttered thinking, resulting in a new form of organization that spawns from what ‘simple’ people view as ‘mess’.

I am by all means not intending to demean or offend those who have a nicely cluttered mind and a very tidy desk – if that is the way that you happen to operate whilst critically thinking, then I by no means commend you. But I am demeaning those who put on an act by purchasing a great desk and keeping it looking like it was the day that they had bought it because they never actually used it. I am simply seeing this occurrence through my own perspective, through a lens I have finessed to the extent where I start to hypothesize in the absence of beakers and chemical equations because I had never quite cluttered up my imaginary science desk, per se.

Perhaps I have scraped the surface of something that someone will now take with them and excavate, or perhaps I have just made you feel as though I am a horrible demeaning person. I beg to differ, though. I am just exploring an observation made by myself. My sister’s side of the desk is quite tidy, and not as cluttered, and her mind cannot formulate the things that I can, at the level that I can, hence I saw it appropriate to hypothesize in this manner.

For years, the books I collected would stay in mint condition because I saw them as collectibles rather than ‘use-ables’. I would look at them with pride as they were locked away safely in storage, and I would cringe at the touching of them by others. Now, I feel differently towards new books. Now, when I see a book, if it looks brand new then I think that it has not been delved into at a proper level enough to allow one to fully comprehend it, whereas if there is a book with crumpled paged, a lined spine, and a curved front or back cover, then I know that it has been read the way it was meant to by the reader, and that it was used for its purpose.

I suppose that is the same idea that I am trying to get to with my desk hypothesis. A cluttered desk means a cluttered mind, and neither of those things while cluttered are cluttered in the negative sense, rather in the positive sense.

Libraries, the Home of Luring Books

There has never been a time where I walk through my university library and walk out empty-handed. Always at the last minute of m stay, as I am walking towards the exit, I find a book on a shelf that calls to me.

The books do not literally call my name, they just sit there, and with the bold writing on their spines catch my eyes - it would prove rather creepy if these books could physically call my name, in which case I would not approach them, I would rather run as fast as I possibly can in the opposite direction until it is physically impossible to hear them calling my name. How would they know my name? And why me? I am the last person any talking book would seek to fulfil their legacy or prophecy. I am far too lazy and when I do move, I move at a pace a turtle would find uncomfortable.

Honestly, though, just when I think I have finished from the gravitational pull of a library and its many uses, I am pulled towards at least one random book which happens to fit my liking. The first time that this occurred, and note that it is the first because I usually tend to avoid bookshelves in the library when I am there to study for this sole reason, is a book about the Third Reich. It was short, stubby and worn out, and without hesitation I pulled it off the cold, hardly visited shelf, and took it to the librarian to scan. I never got around to reading the entire book, I did not even get half way. In fact, I probably read around three pages and on the third, I came across a long sentence. After counting the amount of words in that particular sentence, I had a miniature freak-out. One hundred and twenty-three words. I was so astounded, so amazed, in fact so in awe that I could not pass that page to read on.

Eventually, I had to return the book, so upon my arrival at home the week after it was borrowed, I opened up eBay and bought my very own copy - unfortunately it did not come with the exact cover of that which I fell in love, but it was still the same book, and to this day I am yet to pass the third page. What is important, though, is the fact that I now own this amazing book, and what is more important is that I came to know it by walking pat and walking back to a shelf on which it sat. Had someone placed it their prior to my arrival, in order to tempt me? Perhaps I am getting too carried away, but judging by all the crazy movie ideas I have come across I am failing to view things realistically.

I do not know, now, what scares me more - the prospect of someone having placed that particular book on the shelf for me because they knew I was coming and they knew that I had more than a mild interest in the Third Reich or books with sentences over one hundred words long, or the prospect of a book being able to firstly identify me and secondly call out my name. Anyway, the other day, I picked up a total of around ten books which I had firstly thought were relevant to my research topic, and had miserably left them on the side of the computer desk I was sitting at because they turned out irrelevant. The eleventh book I came across was one about Wittgenstein. The cover looked complicated, and it promised a complex but easy look at this man's life. So I picked it up with the intention of borrowing it.

Then, in the sociology section, a book titled, So You Think You're Human? It had a sophisticatedly dressed monkey on the cover, surrounded by books. I mean, how much more interesting does a book need to get before I feel like borrowing it? So I picked that up too. I asked a companion about the maximum amount of books that I could borrow at one time and was told five. That was the maximum amount I could carry, too, because of how heavy they all were, and coincidentally I only needed three other research relevant books to borrow, so it all worked out fine.

Now, apart from these five books, I have around seven other pieces of reading material and no time because I spend too much of my time procrastinating whilst sitting down rather than actually doing anything. One of these days, one of these days I shall have my life a little more organised. Now, it is three in the morning, so I must log off to go and read a set class text and fall asleep to how boring it is.