sybarite - noun - person who is self-indulgent in their fondness for sensuous luxury (Google).
Sybarite is a fascinating word that apparently is gaining in popularity since its initial use in the mid-16th century. The word derives from Sybaris, once an ancient Greek city in southern Italy, where sybarites thrived. Sybarites are materialists who tend to have taste, preferring the elegant over the cheap. In short, they are hedonistic in nature, reveling in things that are sensuously provocative. According to biographers of F. Scott Fitzgerald, he was a classic sybarite, one drawn to epic grandeur even though his wallet was not capacious enough to support his cravings for the highlife. The sybarite, in my mind, is a cut above your average materialist, one who ranks material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values.
If I were to consider my neighborhood as a microcosm, I'd say that the majority of the populace is materialistic. "Big is better" seems to be a mutually decreed motto as everyone around me is building up and out, eliminating all green space for the sake of comfort. At the extreme end of the materialists would be hoarders, those who can't stand to toss out anything for fear it just might be valuable at some point in time. I have known more than one hoarder in my lifetime (one lives two doors down) and realize there is a psychological component involved that tugs on the strings of compassion. My own mother, a victim of the Great Depression, was a closet hoarder, meaning that all of the stuff that she wouldn't throw out, she accumulated in a gigantic closet: our garage. Just after her death, my father, who was seven years younger than my mother, and hence, too young to experience the Depression full on, looked at the floor-to-ceiling expanse of moldy "antiques" and declared, "Don't even bother to look through it. It's all going." Within days, five dumpsters were filled and carted away. 'The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away."
Over the weekend, I helped a dear materialist friend pack up the contents of her beach house which is slated for a complete million-dollar renovation. She told me that over 200 boxes were filled and stored although to look at the place, still brimming with miscellany, you wouldn't think so. Nothing that she wanted to keep was of any monetary value nor was it necessarily in use. For example, she had about ten identical Corning casserole dishes. In forty years, not once do I remember her making a casserole. The rub is that she owns two other homes in different states that are also packed to the gills with goods. I can't help but feel for her two adult daughters who will someday inherit the expanse that will most likely fill thirty dumpsters, contributing immensely to some lucky landfill in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or Florida. The psychology behind my friend's inability to let go of things is simple: she had spent a large portion of her life with her mother, who died at nearly 100, and anything remotely associated with her, my friend has found impossible to release. The six-hour experience of packing (seemingly to no real avail) left me wanting to return home and start eliminating/donating anything impractical on my own shelves.
When it comes down to it, I will admit that I do like to indulge in expensive vacations as I like to stay at the four and five-star resorts. If that makes me a sybarite, then so be it. When it comes to material things, though, I'd like to think that I am not Madonna, the material girl living in the material world. I'd like to think that if all of my possessions were eliminated via a holocaust, I'd would just fall back on, "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away." To lose everything would force me into a more spiritual state of being. Which wouldn't be a bad thing. Would it?
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