It may be May, but I'm still shoveling out from under a heavy fall…of paper. I brought five full shopping bags of recent but discarded magazines and catalogs back from my parents' house. Together they must have weighed a hundred pounds. I heaved them all into the recycling bin. Friday I took my own recycling to the bin, another thirty pounds or so of paper. And now on Saturday the new shopping bag is already filling up. Where does all this paper come from? We were promised a paper-free society, where everyone would somehow keep every document, no matter how trivial, on a digital medium of some kind. It hasn't happened.

If you give even a little bit of charity in this country, you are deluged by mass mailings from every related charity, which has received your address from the one you gave to in an exponentially expanding chain letter. I've discussed this before in regard to name and address labels. I now have well over a thousand of them. But I have received more than just labels. I've gotten handfuls of dainty little note pads, each printed with cute animals or flowers or butterflies (how come I don't get little note pads with motorcycles or radiotelescopes or fire engines on them?) each of them printed with my mundane name. I've gotten cheesy gadgets like calculator clocks, or kitchen scrapers, or packs of seeds, or even real U.S. coins. And all the paper from this ever-needy world goes into the recycle bin. The ever-needy world is recycled, to come back needing again.

It has been a week since I got back to my home, and only now have I made any progress in getting order back into my dwelling. Is it too much to ask for one open space, one clear flat surface somewhere in this overpacked apartment? Most of you readers know exactly what I am talking about, because you live in the same conditions. If any of you have a clear, clean house with nice flat open workspaces, I want to visit you. But then you wouldn't have those nice spaces any more.

I wouldn't call it "claustrophobia," because I am capable of working in the most enclosed and hemmed in of spaces without too much distress. What I experience is a longing for open space. Not only open space to live in, but open space to walk through, open space to gaze into and see a horizon rather than a city. I have been many times to the plains of Kansas, a state I have grown to love. There beyond the cities of Lawrence or Topeka lies an endless surrealistic openness that seemed to me, when I first saw it, as if I had gone off to another planet. But it was Planet Kansas, on this same good Earth. Out there is more space on land than a Bostonian could possibly imagine. You have to see it to believe it.

I would name it "agoraphilia," not claustrophobia. Even a big wide parking lot or an open schoolyard or a modern courtyard here in MidAtlantica sometimes evokes that feeling in me. If I were to drive an hour west of my current location, I would find one of the few flat areas in the state of Virginia, where you can actually see a land horizon rather than hills covered with trees. But that area is already being encroached upon by the city, which one day will stretch all the way from Washington to West Virginia.

Somewhere out in this USA is a place where I could find a dwelling big enough to have open workspaces, without costing a huge amount in rent. I have fantasies of fleeing to a town just big enough to have broadband internet (which I must have, now that it exists) but small enough to still have open land around it. I would like there to be a small college of some kind there, so I could perhaps take courses or at least ask some questions. I have passed through these places in Iowa and Indiana and Missouri and Kansas, states which people from my part of the country look down on as boring, benighted, ignorant, and religion-ridden. Just admitting that I might want to live there is a dangerous thought. Right now it is just a fantasy. It may stay a fantasy forever, but no matter what, I do not want the paper drifts to bury me.

Posted at 3:13 am | link