To throw or not to throw?

I used to move a lot: about 38 times in total, generally only packing papers, books and clothes. The only furniture I took with me a couple of times were four director's chairs and two standing lamps.

In the last 12 years, however, I have stayed put and accumulated stuff. And that includes an awful lot of papers: old banks statements that have to be kept for 10 years according to the tax office, old photocopies of grammar exercises copied out of books, short stories used in classes, articles from newspapers that are either informative for me or that could be used in a classroom. And letters: official letters from the tax office, bank correspondence, letters from when I bought and then sold a flat, and lots and lots of private letters (that will never be thrown). 

Every now and then, I think that I should sort stuff out and get rid of a whole load of papers. However, I always start to think that maybe I shouldn't. Maybe, so I think, I will become famous for some reason. Maybe I will one day start to write books that will either become popular or have great literary value and then everyone will want to know everything about me. An official biographer will then sort through all my papers to build a picture of me and what I did and when. 

These days, so I hear, most people correspond only via e-mails and it is going to be much harder for the biographers of the future to get hold of material they can read and use for their book on the famous person. E-mails can easily be deleted; old e-mail accounts become idle; and the password assigned to them are forgotten. (Who prints off e-mails from beloved friends and relatives and then ties up the piles in ribbon and stores them in a drawer or cupboard?)

So what should I do? Should I chuck large chunks of my life away and risk a biographer not having anything to write about? Or should I leave everything stuffed away in the cupboards? Hmmm...Here's a thought...I could always set up shelves in my room in the cellar. 😃