Every now and then, someone will be walking through a peat bog, usually somewhere in Northern Europe, and come across a perfectly preserved body from the Iron Age.
Peat bogs are watery, marshy fields made up of compressed vegetation and alkaline soil. Anything that falls into them turns leathery and supple over time, like a really terrific pair of loafers.
I have a friend who is an archaeologist, and he says that almost everything we want to know about the bog bodies (who they were, how they lived, that kind of thing) is revealed by what’s buried around them.
For instance, if you find a comb or a writing implement around a burial site, that tells you something about who that person was. Rich people had combs. Clerks and librarians had writing instruments. Royalty had cats.
Our stuff, in other words, says a lot about who we are. If you really want to understand someone — a long-dead king, a random bog corpse, even a neighbor who creeps you out — the best way is to go through their stuff. In the case of the neighbor, you don’t have to wait until he’s been dead and buried in a peat bog for 2,000 years. Everything you want to know about him will be revealed by sifting through his garbage.
Or his closets.
The peat bog in my life is my clothes closet, where I’ve packed away layers of clothing and other artifacts that, together, paint a pretty accurate picture of my life thus far.
Like a lot of us, I’ve had some time on my hands recently. So a few weeks ago, I decided to sort through all of my clothes, get rid of things I no longer wear, make sure that the years of uninhibited bread-eating haven’t rendered too many things tight and uncomfortable, and generally take stock of what I’ve bought, either wisely or impulsively, over the years.
It’s an impressive and revealing archaeological dig. It’s also the kind of mortifying experience best done when alone in the house — somewhere between the second and ninth cocktail of the evening.
What I discovered on hangers squeezed at the back and in plastic Container Store bins stacked precariously high were things like this: jackets with lapels as narrow as a pencil and some with lapels as wide as a bedsheet, trousers with multiple pleats and cuffs big enough that I look like a gypsy dancer, and shirts with complicated patterns somewhere between a paisley and an early rendition of the virus that causes COVID-19. Resort logo polo shirts, gray flannel trousers in a humiliating variety of waist sizes, some hats that I must have thought were a good idea, and a stack of T-shirts commemorating Nantucket summers from 1992 to 2016, inclusive.
Properly cataloged and dated by some kind of anthropologist, the entire collection will be able to provide an accurate snapshot of my specific financial situation since I first started working as an adult in 1990. In the pile of clothes is recorded the story of the television business around the turn of the last century and my personal embrace of the Department of Agriculture’s food pyramid, which some of you will recall recommended a diet heavy on breads and pastas.
The current style in men’s fashion, tighter, more formfitting, shorter around the shoulders, is unrepresented in my wardrobe because for the past few years, I’ve been trying to write a play and take some time for travel and entrepreneurial pursuits, so I’ve been careful about laying out money.
Also, I’m not what you’d call a gym enthusiast. If I wore one of the currently fashionable men’s suits, I’d probably look like a baked potato bursting out of the foil. But an archaeologist wouldn’t know that. Sorting through my clothes from some future dig, tomorrow’s archaeologists will probably assume I died in 2004.
Of course, I didn’t. In a way, I’ve just come to my senses. Seeing a mound of expensive and slightly outdated clothing has a clarifying effect on the mind. I packed up all of my painfully ridiculous clothes and gave them away and moved my solid, traditional WASP wear to the front. Out came the Oxford button-downs. The blazers were brushed clean. The dependable straight-leg khakis were washed, pressed, and stacked in a handy pile.
Archaeologists of the future will have no idea how many regrettable wardrobe mistakes I made. Their idea of who I was and how I lived will be the cleaned-up, airbrushed version of my newly organized closet. I am ready, finally, for the peat bog.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
