ends & oddmoney

The pleasures of poverty

I’ve been broke most of my life, and occasionally poor. Being poor means you’re in danger of being evicted, you ‘fast’ because you’ve run out of food money, you walk 5 miles through a crack ghetto to save bus fare, you sell cherished books for pennies, you help yourself to left-over food in cafes; you end up sleeping on someone’s sofa and eating out of bins. Being broke just means you can’t afford anything nice; or you can have one thing but not another — so you can go to the cinema but then you can’t buy a new CD. Pleasures tend to be strictly metered.

I am at present broke but edging towards poverty. It does, however, have its consolations. For example, as I write, in the North of England, it is half past nine on a Sunday evening and the shops are closed. I have eaten nothing except two apples and five oat cakes, each about 50 calories. I slept in late so will probably only turn in long after midnight. At some point I will become hungry; if so, I will either toast a crumpet, or simply drink more green tea. I could have gone shopping but my wallet said no, and it will do me no harm to live on apples and oatcakes for a day or two. This is a pleasurable hunger; it is not the dieter’s self-denying hunger, which is indeed a hard and grim ordeal; it is enjoyable, because you know you are saving money, and that is always a good thing.

When money is tight little things take on value: finding 50 pence on the street is a major find, cause for celebration; if the supermarket reduces a pie from £3 to £1 you feel you have cheated the Man and won a great victory against Evil Top-Hat-Wearing-Capitalists; if your local library has an expensive new book on the shelf, you have, once more, triumphed against the System.

When I began buying books and music and films, aged 19 or so, I had to do so out of my food money. I would give up puddings and biscuits for a fortnight so I could buy a new book. I look around my garret now, with its 500 or more books, many of which I must now cull, and remember my 19-year-old-self and his prized library: about 20 books — William Burroughs, Camus, Nietzsche, TS Eliot, Yeats, Blake, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Conrad. Each book represented sacrifice; I didn’t idly buy these books — I would fantasize about each purchase for weeks in advance; in the supermarket, my hand reached out for a packet of biscuits — the thought of a lusted-after copy of Beyond Good and Evil interposed itself like a Homeric god on the battlefield — sometimes Nietzsche prevailed, sometimes not. I was no saint when it came to biscuits.

And music! Back in 1995, in England at least, a new CD couldn’t be had for under a king’s ransom. A new Beatles album meant weeks of deprivation. My hand would tremble as I took Revolver to the till. Back home, I would coo over my new treasure like a thorough lunatic. It would be played and played and played, till I grew so sick of the Beatles I couldn’t listen to them for a good 5 years. When I bought a new album, by God I listened to it.

I now have about 500 CDs. Some of them I haven’t listened to more than a dozen times; nothing wrong with them, they just don’t grab me. I am surrounded by things that have no hold on me, but which burden me nonetheless — I can’t just pack up my possessions in 30 minutes; last time, it took more like 6 hours and precipitated a nearly-lethal asthma attack. My hundreds of CDs, my hundreds of books, don’t actually mean more to me than my 19-year-old’s 20 CDs and books; perhaps there is a fairly static quantity of attachment, and if you have more things, you simply care about each thing less.

In about 6 weeks I’m planning to leave my country and go to Europe to TEFL (Teach English as a Foreign Language). I don’t even know where I’ll be, yet. In preparation I have put my CDs on an ipod, and I am vigorously culling my books. What I can’t take with me goes in a friend’s garage, and will most likely stay there for a good long time.

I think of Tom Cruise’s assassin in Collateral, arriving in an airport with everything he needs in a briefcase. If I could, I would reduce everything in my life to such exact proportions. Being broke is an excellent discipline, albeit not one I have chosen. Right now, hunger growing in me, everything has value, everything is weighted and considered, and this is how it should be.

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6 Responses to “The pleasures of poverty”

  1. Thank you, Walter, for a good piece of writing.

  2. Very well written. Thank you.

    LK

  3. Great post. I presume you have read Knut Hamsen’s Hunger?

  4. i’ve not, unless so many years ago i’ve forgotten.

  5. You might like it, although it does get a bit histrionic and angst ridden. Reminiscent of Dostoevsky, only without the irony or profound depths of perception. However he’s very good on poverty- your description reminded me of Hamsun.

  6. Yes, Hunger, excellent choice. I’ve never starved on the streets of Scandinavia, but when visiting Copenhagen 20 years ago, I met an American living rather well on his girlfriend’s couch and funding his Christiana lifestyle by collecting empty beer bottles throughout town.

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