Here's an interesting and nonhypothetical question. Say you were contemplating a move that required serious downsizing - to a place half the size of your current house. Say further that you were told you could take 60 kilos of your stuff. (The new place is furnished.) The rest of your gear will go into storage. What would you take?
Another way to put that is, how many clothes and books fit into 60 kilos, and what else do you need? That's a bit more than I weigh, but while I can visualize a 60-kilo person, I don't have a good idea how much stuff that is.
You also have whatever suitcases you carry with you. You could pay to send more stuff if you want, but it's expensive - the US Postal Service charges about $50 for a 20 kilo box, if you don't mind waiting a few weeks. (There are probably cheaper ways to ship freight.) It may be cheaper to buy some things new after you move but you don't want to waste money on duplication. Plus you have good reason to want to save as much of your money as possible, either for travel in your new place or for whatever happens next.
So what do you take? Clothes are fairly easy. You leave all the stuff you keep only for sentimental reasons, or that you hardly ever wear. You take your favorite clothes, and the stuff most suited to the climate and to what you'll be doing. Easy. You need your home computer, of course - what does a computer weigh? At least ours has a flat monitor. Or do you replace it with a laptop?
If you're me, you take your beading gear. That's small and light - it won't quite fit in one case, but two will leave plenty of space for expansion, and these cases are only about 12"x12"by6". You leave the odds and ends of yarn but take the knitting needles and any yarn you have enough of to make something. Yarn is light, too.
But what about the books? Apparently plenty of people relocate without books but I can't even imagine that. Say you have 30 kilos left, what books can you part with for a year or three? The textbooks, those won't hurt to leave. The dictionary and thesaurus and maybe even the omniscient New York Public Library Desk Reference, because their information is available online. All the coffee table books, the ones that were gifts or were on sale cheap, because you hardly ever read those and they're heavy and bulky. Maybe all the comic collections - they have a low content-to-weight ratio.
Some things obviously need to come along, because they have an extremely high entertainment-to-weight ratio: the single volume containing 7 Jane Austen novels. The complete Aubrey and Maturin novels in 5 volumes - this is exactly why I bought it. Either the Norton Anthology of Poetry or the Oxford Book of English Verse, though probably not both. The Complete Pooh (the Milne books, not the Disney ones). Maybe Barzun's extremely dense From Dawn to Decadence, which I bought in Korea in 2002 and still have only half-finished. Maybe the Steven Jay Goulds.
Then there are the things I love too much to leave behind. The hardcover of Freedom and Necessity. The few LM Alcotts I own (because I've read the others so many times I don't need to own them) and all of the LM Montgomerys - the latter fortunately almost all in paperback. The Harry Potter hardcovers - or maybe not, this would be a good time to buy the English editions in paperback. All of the Dorothy Sayers, which are mostly beat up paperbacks. The set of Dark is Rising paperbacks.
But then what else? The obvious answers are to weight it heavily toward paperbacks, and to leave behund anything I've only read once, because anything I don't reread I don't like all that much. But that still leaves a wide and varied field.
What would you take?
Posted by dichroic at July 28, 2006 01:22 PM