What he had brought with him had been a significant decision. Gene had moved a lot (almost every year) and this time he had decided that it would be no more than necessary; not mementos that he was lightly attached to; not old things; not clothes he hoped would one day fit again; nor paperwork that was ten years old. Here in his new life as a graduate student, he would take only that which was necessary and maybe that which had contributed to his arrival. And he’d been pleased because what he had ultimately decided to bring fit in a small pick-up truck and a little trailer. He hadn’t honed his belongings down to the Buddhist means he sometimes fantasized himself as being, but he had clearly fewer possessions now then the last time he had left. Surely they fit into a 14’ x 21’ confine.

Unpacked and even arranged as sparsely as possible, his belongings barely took up a sixth of the floor space of the second floor of the factory. If he stood at the northwest corner of the floor (his belongings being in the southwest corner) and watched the dying light of the sunset fall across the Ohio River and lightly tread through the dirty glass of the factory windows, the whole of his quiet life took on the tenor of a strange experiment—a human terrarium in progress. And it seemed a reflection of his own chosen study of cognitive psychology that he never arrived home at the end of the stairs, but instead made the long seventy yard walk to his “apartment,” gradually and feeling himself under some kind of alien observation.

Those seemingly smoke-infested sunbeams, broken only by unchiseled paint on the glass, as that light faded to black and shadow, he came to live in an orb of his own light, surrounded by space that seemed to call him. Other than the amber of his two corner brick walls, he was surrounded by dark space, shadow, and possibility.

Read the whole thread: A Field Guide to the Socially Inept

Characters and Places: anti-materialism, Gene Copeland, moving