This is an unexpected column. I was halfway into writing a piece on the best bookshops of the world, when there came a peremptory knock at the door. It was a courier, holding—with both hands—a huge cardboard box, the size of a small shipping container. That was probably a mistake: I had been expecting delivery of two small sachets of a Thai curry paste, ordered via Amazon from the Coconut Kitchen, but no bulky items...
I carried the unwieldy, yet suspiciously light, box into the house. “Untamed Cat Food. Contains 56 Tins,” was printed on the lid in large letters. And underneath—in somewhat smaller characters: “Warning: if left empty and unattended this box will contain a cat”. Ha ha. Very funny. The only problem was that we didn’t have a cat!
It took me several minutes to uncover the contents. It was like trying to unwrap a jokey Christmas present, with a small chocolate or a miniature bijouterie item hidden under layers of paper. I was reminded of the quote, often attributed to Confucius, on the difficulty of finding a black cat in a dark room, particularly when the cat wasn’t there.
And it wasn’t. Instead of a cat, buried under multiple balls of rumpled brown paper at the bottom of the box, rested two tiny sachets of my coveted curry paste!
At least the Coconut Kitchen, or whoever did the packaging, had re-used a giant cat food crate rather than dispatching my minuscule order in a brand new and disproportionately large cardboard or plastic envelope. In my experience, this is something Amazon does routinely, in contradiction to its pledge “to use as little packaging as possible”.
I cannot help noticing that Amazon and some other companies—both online and retail—have become “overgenerous” with packaging materials of late. It is no longer unusual to receive a pocket-size paperback, or a blister packet of pills, in a plastic bag that could easily accommodate all seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
To rephrase an old adage, good things no longer come in small packages, but get delivered in enormous parcels.
Here’s a somewhat extreme, yet 100 per cent truthful, example. A couple of years ago, to satisfy my growing interest in Buddhism, I ordered from Amazon the book Emptiness. A Practical Guide for Meditators by Guy Armstrong. A habitually oversized brown envelope arrived the following day. But believe it or not, inside the envelope was pure emptiness (or “sunyata”, in Sanskrit). Was Amazon trying to teach me a quick lesson in Mahayana Buddhism?
I contacted the senders, who apologised and sent me another brown envelope, this time containing Emptiness, not emptiness, and the case was closed, with two large pieces of cardboard added to our uncomplaining waste bin.
In my first, Soviet, life, packaging was easy. Karl Schlögel, a distinguished German historian, devoted a couple of pages of his excellent book The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World to the peculiar “coarse, grey-brown” wrapping paper of the Soviet Union. He remarked that the wrapping “really had been representative of an entire period” and noted insightfully that it was suitable for packaging everything: “the same greyish-brown paper could be used for a loaf of bread or for a newly bought ring intended as a gift.”
The respected professor didn’t mention, however, another important purpose of the nondescript Soviet wrapping paper—to conceal the contents of the so-called special food parcels, or “zakazi”, given to the elite. I used to routinely pick up such thoroughly wrapped parcels from an oxymoronic “zakritiy magazin” (a “closed store” in Russian) in the centre of Moscow—one of many similar “stores” from which “ordinary” people were barred. I did it on the request of my aging landlady—the widow of a general, with an appropriate last name, Lev (“Lion”). Like some gluttonous Egyptian pharaohs, the Red Army top brass were entitled to “special” food supplies even after their demise.
The thick wrapping paper was indispensable for concealing the scandalously “un-Soviet” and enticingly edible contents (such as oranges, chocolates, slices of ham; at times, even a tin of caviar—all permanently unavailable in “ordinary” Soviet shops) from permanently hungry Muscovites. I carried the inscrutable parcel home on the Moscow Metro in an “avos’ka”—a “just-in-case” string bag, kindly provided by Mrs Lion.
This “coarse grey-brown wrapping paper” was one consumer item of which the USSR experienced no shortages, for there was a lot to conceal. And the recycling of anything, except, perhaps, for some stale communist dogmas, wasn’t an issue.
But here, in the west, what are we trying to hide under the hugely superfluous packaging? Perhaps it is a kind of a non-Buddhist spiritual “emptiness”: the all-permeating I-don’t-care attitude, because of which millions of tonnes of plastic and other waste make their way into the oceans. It pains me to think of the long-suffering lungs of our once-green planet, now packaged up in a grey-brown smog, slowly suffocating it from within.
