The Life-Changing Magic of Cleansing Your Soul

by Anthony Arroyo

This essay appears in Issue 2 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

by Marie Kondo and Scott Sonenshein

Little, Brown Spark, 256 pp., $10.95

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Late in the great cycle of peoples and nations, a conqueror comes from without to wreak havoc on a puffy, sterile civilization. This conqueror is incomprehensible to the current order. He is evil. Worse, he is an atavism. But this conqueror is the force which freshens the dying mass and creates a new possibility of ascent; ascent which has become impossible from within.

Marie Kondo is one such conqueror, hailing from the mists of the east. The islands that we now know as Nippon are a global tide pool, wherein relics of past manvantaras still live and mingle with the currents of today. Like all culture heroes, Kondo refines things to their essence. She distills eons of tradition, learned debate, and warfare into an easily communicable idea: “tidying.”

Tidying is an exhortation to purge, and a great purgation is what is most needed at this late stage. A great sloughing off of old ways, old things and old forms. Everything on the face of the earth shall be tried, not according to any law of men, but according to the iron standard of joy, which the Kondoist experiences not as a subjective opinion, but as a metaphysical constant.