Life is....

Life is something unfathomable, ever-changing, mysterious, and every attempt to confine it within an artificial, abstract structure inevitably ends up homogenizing, regimenting, standardizing and destroying life, as well as curtailing everything that projects beyond, overflows or falls outside the abstract project. What is a concentration camp, after all, but an attempt by Utopians to dispose of those elements which do not fit in?

Vaclav Havel
qtd. in Real Politics

De-cluttering

Consumer culture...explains why, although actual cooking and cleaning may be in decline, home organization and elaborate decorating are in the ascendancy. The current mania for de-cluttering offers the flattering fantasy that, via empowered consumer choice, individuals can create a system to transcend once and for all the messiness of life--a spirit akin to all the great, and failed, utopian ideologies.

Caroline Langston
"Housekeeping" from The Other Journal