Heart Flutter Things

I had never heard of Marie Kondo until I recently heard a news story to the effect that her popular decluttering programme was having such an impact that charity shops were overwhelmed by donations and having to turn them away. I haven't observed this phenomenon in the charity shops around here, but no doubt there is something in it.
  Marie Kondo's decluttering vocation cam to her very early, at junior school, where she preferred tidying the bookshelves to all other activities and would clamour to be named class bookshelf organiser. It was while shelf-tidying at school that she had a kind of revelation. As she relates it, 'I was obsessed with what I could throw away. One day, I had a kind of nervous breakdown and fainted. I was unconscious for two hours. When I came to, I heard a mysterious voice, like some god of tidying, telling me to look at my things more closely. And I realised my mistake: I was only looking for things to throw out. What I should be doing is finding the things I want to keep. Identifying the things that make you happy: that is the work of tidying.'
  This insight is, it seems, closely related to Shinto thinking (Kondo spent five years as a miko [attendant maiden] at a Shinto shrine). The aim of Kondo-style decluttering is to get rid of all but the things that truly give you pleasure, the kokoro tokimeku mono (literally 'heart flutter things'). This seems sound enough, in its minimalist way – but Marie Kondo has, I understand, decreed that we should have no more than 30 books in our homes. Thirty books! I suppose, if pushed, some of us might be able to come up with a list of 30 books that we particularly treasure, that we reread often and that seem essential to who we are – but to throw out all the rest and have no other books around us is unthinkable.
 Most homes these days have few books anyway (and those mostly bad). I was delighted last night, half-watching Grand Designs, to see that, in the finished house, there was a substantial (and movable) bookcase, holding a few hundred books, many of them apparently classics. A rare sighting in the open-plan glass boxes that Grand Designs specialises in.