Dirt, it has been said, is matter out of place. The good housekeeper makes every effort to discard dirt, to restore order and to make room for new acquisitions. If someone were to admonish her for trashing yesterday's moldy vegetables or last year's stained and torn clothing, she would be astonished.

Dirt is also matter out of time. The dinosaurs don't belong in today's world. The farms which comprised New Amsterdam wouldn't fit in modern New York. Yet any time a building, or a species, outlives its time, a great outcry is heard: ''Save the landmarks! Preserve the whooping crane!''

It is true that these outdated objects form part of our history, and should not be forgotten. But pictures, or models, in their proper place in a museum, would suffice, without consuming space and funds better utilized to house and feed the needy, or otherwise to improve the lot of the present occupants of our world.

There follows a list of the items in this country that would be better placed in history than survive beyond their time:

1. All the beds George Washington slept in.

2. All the recipes containing ingredients that cannot be obtained, increase our blood pressure, or cost more than they should.

3. All the clothing worn by defunct celebrities. (You can have my old clothes for nothing.)

4. The theaters, houses and tombs where celebrities of the past are trapped for eternity. When someone has passed on, he should be permitted to disappear with dignity, and no one except his immediate heirs should be allowed to poke through his personal belongings. Even his corpse would be honored more by being given to science than by stuffing it in a hole in the ground to rot or be eaten by worms.

5. Antique cars. There's a good reason for the expression, ''They don't make 'em like that no more.''

Santayana's pronouncement that those who don't remember history are doomed to relive it neglects to observe that those who persist in maintaining the past are living in history. As Shakespeare asserted, the past is but prologue, and we should be living in the present.

No, of course I won't throw out my high school yearbook! Don't you have any sentiment at all?