* The French essayist Paul Valéry argued that if you want to always be able to find your treasured possessions, simply be yourself and put them wherever your instinct tells you. It is only once you start trying to organize everything in a conscious way that things get lost. Valéry may have been overstating the case, but he was on to something: nothing is ever quite so totally lost as when it has been tidied away according to an organizational system that is opaque.