Redding up

In Pittsburghese, that's what I've spent much of the holiday weekend doing. I don't know why, but that's what we used to call cleaning up and putting things in order.

Another way to put it: I've been editing my life.

Living in a small apartment imposes a certain discipline: Every now and then, you have to sit down and do an inventory of your life -- deciding what to keep and what to toss -- in order to keep one's accumulated possessions from taking over.

This is painful. The hardest for me is parting with books. Every time I do, I realize that a chapter of my life is over: No, I probably will not read that novel again, or become an art historian, or. . . or. . .

The longer I have been a reporter, the more I have realized why I'm not an editor: The ability to zero in on the one key item; the strength of mind to know what to throw away -- those are not skills that come naturally to me.

And yet, in our information-saturated age, it seems to me that is a skill worth cultivating.

The sheer volume of what is published can be overwhelming and depressing. This weekend, I made many, many trips from my apartment to Second Story Books, a nice used bookstore in my neighborhood. I was stunned at how much they rejected: Good condition (no writing inside) hardback literary biographies and some fiction.

If even works like this, which made it through the ultra-selective publishing mill to find a place between hard covers, are considered to be in glut, then what are we to think about the stream of consciousness that is the Internet? Is any of it worth saving? Does it matter if it isn't?

Or is the idea of the internet not permanence but flow? A service like Twitter seems to me to give a whole new meaning to the term "stream of consciousness"... it is a stream of the collective consciousness, with the charm being not the profundity (because most of it is quite banal) but the reach. At any given moment I am in touch with funny, charming, boring, touching but human, every human observations from all over the globe. Does it matter if none of it is worth keeping beyond the moment in which it is created. As Doestoevsky once wrote: "It's life that matters, nothing but life, that endless, perpetual process of discovering. Not the discovery itself, at all."

These are some of the things I'm thinking about as I close several volumes of my life and ready the ones Second Story rejected for donating to the library. Here's hoping these little shards of myself find a happy home.