Thoughts on The Clothes They Stood Up In

Thoughts on The Clothes They Stood Up In

Each summer the “organizer” book club that I belong to reads a fiction book.  Usually, it has something to do with the challenges people have with their stuff. This year we are reading The Clothes They Stood Up In by Alan Bennett.

It’s a sweet little read about a couple who goes to the opera one night.  Upon their return, the apartment was in a very empty state. Someone had taken all of their belongings.

The woman character shows some insight into her thought process about all of her belongings. And how they are holding her back from experiencing life.

The author writes:

“Mrs. Ransome had begun to see that to be so abruptly parted from all her worldly goods might bring with it benefits she would have hesitated to call spiritual. And which might, more briskly, be put under the heading of “improving the character.”

To have the carpet almost literally pulled from under her shoulder, she felt, induced salutary thoughts about the way she had lived her life. War would once have rescued her, of course, some turn of events that gave her no choice, and while what had happened was not a catastrophe on that scale she knew it was up to her to make of it what she could. She would go to museums, she thought, art galleries. Learn about the history of London. There were classes of all sorts nowadays. Classes that she could have attended. All of this before they were deprived of everything. Except that it was everything they had in the world, she felt, that had been holding her back. Now she could start.”

I do believe that people today, spend so much time acquiring “things” that the acquiring becomes the experience. Have you gone on a vacation and after returning home talked more about the shopping you did than the places you visited or the people you met?

More on “The Clothes They Stood Up In” next time.