48 CONTEXT 184 : JUNE 2025 Too much stuff In William Hazlitt’s 1823 essay My First Acquaintance with Poets, I was struck by the sentence ‘So have I loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best.’ It immediately occurred to me that this was an apt description of a retired architect whose sole remaining serious occupation is writing glib pieces for a quarterly journal. But the very next sentence is inapt: ‘I have wanted only one thing to make me happy; but wanting that, have wanted everything!’ Hazlitt’s use of the word ‘want’ is in its old sense of ‘not having’, which was, at the time of his essay, beginning to be supplanted in common parlance by its modern usage of ‘hanker after’; and I wondered whether this realignment of meaning could be associated with the parallel rise in consumerism. The word ‘stuff’ was deprecated by my mother as a generalising Americanism (although she was content with the Englishism of ‘things’), but the word is now ubiquitous and must be used particularly as we have now, apparently, passed the point of ‘peak stuff’. Humankind’s relationship with stuff predates civilization, as evidenced widely in grave goods. Equally, the repudiation of stuff is almost as old and has arisen in many cultures. The philosopher Epicurus thought the desire for stuff understandable, but that that did not make it necessary. He preferred good living which is apparently what, post-peak-stuff, many people are spending their money on. Good living also crops up in the Rule of St Benedict, albeit of a more ascetic kind, along with the active suppression of personal belongings. But while Cistercian life may have been a happy one, it almost certainly was not epicurean in the modern sense. The retrospective philosophies of Thomas Carlisle and John Ruskin were influential on the young William Morris, whose craft-based interior designs were pointedly aimed at ridding the Victorian era of its clutter. But contemporary photographs in the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow show that his interiors were not entirely free of knick-knacks. For really serious progress against stuff we had to wait for the Bauhaus and the subsequent modern movement, with the epitome of stuff-free living being the architect Philip Johnson’s Glass House at New Canaan, Connecticut. Exactly how habitable this house was is open to conjecture. But I suggest that the situation posed in Flanders and Swann’s song Design for Living, in which the owners ‘actually live’ in the house next door, might well have pertained. The Caird ménage has recently moved, after 39 years of residence, from a large house in the country, complete with cellars, attics and other appurtenances, to a much smaller house in the town. Needless to say ‘stuff’ has been a constant issue for some months, with constant disposals to family, Freecycle, charity shops, the recycling centre and, in extremis, a skip. This excess ‘stuff’ can be categorised (with examples) as: too large (a fair-sized grand piano); too many (books, kept lest we should want to read them again); too sentimental (great grandma’s dessert service, retained solely in solidarity with the two previous generations of custodians); too optimistic (things kept because they might someday be useful). Will we miss any of it? Maybe not. Hazlitt’s ‘acquaintance with poets’ was no matter of braggadocio. He was present when Coleridge received the offer by the Wedgwood brothers of the annuity that allowed him to become a full-time poet; and Coleridge’s friendship led him into the poetic circle that included Wordsworth, Southey, Keats and Lamb. Hazlitt’s fondness of Shakespeare gave rise to an influential playby-play series of essays. Of The Merchant of Venice he declares himself not in love with Portia’s maid Nerissa, despite she and her husband, the jester Gratiano, giving us some of the pithiest philosophy in the play. So, on the subject of ‘stuff’, perhaps Nerissa sums it up best of all: ‘They are as sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing’.’ James Caird Philip Johnson, architect of the Glass House (Drawing: Rob Cowan)
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