Spring II. Home

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Spring I. Exposition

The exquisite quiet of this room! I have been sitting in utter idleness, watching the sky, viewing the shape of golden sunlight upon the carpet, which changes as the minutes pass, letting my eye wander from one framed print to another, and along the ranks of my beloved books. Within the house nothing stirs. In the garden I can hear singing of birds, I can hear the rustle of their wings. And thus, if it please me, I may sit all day long, and into the profound quiet of the night.

My house is perfect. By great good fortune I have found a housekeeper no less to my mind, a low-voiced, light-footed woman of discrete age, strong and deft enough to render me all the service I require, and not afraid of solitude. She rises very early. By my breakfast-time there remains little to be done under the roof save dressing of meals. Very rarely do I hear even a clink of crockery; never the closing of a door or window. Oh, blessed silence! [So this is to be an Utopian Fiction]

There is not the remotest possibility of any one’s calling upon me, and that I should call upon any one else is a thing undreamt of. I owe a letter to a friend; perhaps I shall write it before bedtime; perhaps I shall leave it till tomorrow morning. A letter of friendship should never be written save when the spirit prompts. I have not yet looked at the newspaper. Generally I leave it till I come back from my walk; it amuses me then to see what the noisy world is doing, what new self-torments men have discovered, what new forms of vain toil, what new occasions of peril and of strife. I grudge to give the first freshness of the morning mind to things so sad and foolish.

My house is perfect. Just large enough to allow the grace of order in domestic circumstance; just that superfluity of intramural space, to lack which is to be less than at one’s ease. The fabric is sound; the work in wood and plaster tells of a more leisurely and a more honest age than ours... The first thing in one’s home is comfort; let beauty of detail be added if one has the means, the patience, the eye.

To me this little book-room is beautiful, and chiefly because it is home. Through the greater part of life I was homeless. Many places have I inhabited, some which my soul loathed, and some which pleased me well; but never till now with that sense of security which makes a home. At any moment I might have been driven forth by evil hap, by nagging necessity... I have my home at last. When I place a new volume on my shelves, I say: Stand there whilst I have eyes to see you; and a joyous tremor thrills me. This house is mine on a lease of a score years. So long I certainly shall not live; but, if I did, even so long should I have the wherewithal to pay my rent and buy my food...

In vain I have pondered the Stoic virtues. I know that it is folly to fret about the spot of one’s abode on this little earth.

All places that the eye of heaven visits

Are to the wise man ports and happy havens.

But I have always worshipped wisdom afar off. In the sonorous period of the philosopher, in the golden measure of the poet, I find it of all things lovely. To its possession I shall never attain. What will it serve me to pretend a virtue of which I am incapable? To me the place and manner of my abode is of supreme import... Were I to think that I should die away from England, the thought would be dreadful to me. And in England, this is the dwelling of my choice; this is my home.

Alpha.

Gissing did die “away from England,” though I don’t know if the thought was so dreadful to him. According to Wikipedia, “In response to a Christmas Eve telegram, H.G. Wells came to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to be at Gissing's side in his final days and helped nurse him during his last illness... Gissing is buried in the English cemetery at Saint-Jean-de-Luz.” But, as you may recall from the Introduction, I’ve read elsewhere that it was H.G. Wells’ “nursing” that hastened his death.

When I realized I had a secure “living” and a little cash to spare, I decided to remodel the apartment I’d been living in for some time. Unlike Ryecroft, I had spent decades studying design magazines for ideas I was never in a position to implement until now. I retained a vague but pleasing recollection of the description of Lawrence Selden’s apartment from the beginning of The House Of Mirth by Edith Wharton -- the crucial, and fatal, scene where Lily visits, for what should have been a perfectly innocent respite from the heat and crowds of August in New York City. Rereading the passage, I was surprised how little description there was:  

He ushered her into a slip of a hall hung with framed prints. She noticed the letters and notes heaped on the table among his gloves and sticks; then she found herself in a small library, dark but cheerful, with its walls of books, a pleasantly faded Turkey rug, a littered desk and, as he had foretold, a tea-tray on a low table near the window. A breeze had sprung up, swaying inward the muslin curtains and bringing a fresh scent of mignonette and petunias from the flower-box on the balcony.

Lilly sank with a sigh into one of the shabby leather chairs.

“How delicious to have a place like this all to one’s self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman.”

I suppose what impressed me was Lilly’s take on the place. In her eyes it was a delightful, masculine haven.

I went more with my vague feeling about the place than with the actual description when planning my remodel. My apartment is on the 2nd floor, at the rear of an older wood building, but the building stands on a slope so I am actually three floors above the quiet garden which is completely isolated from the street. I was permitted to convert the large sash window, overlooking the garden, into French windows (with window-boxes) and I’ve placed a metal bistro table with two chairs, square in the middle of this window. Here I eat at least one meal a day and, when the weather is fine, often sit and read with the windows thrown open.

In the past I frequented cafes to read and work on my laptop but now I often stay here at my little private table above the garden. What drove me away from the cafes was the noise. Anyone who wishes to hear music these days will provide their own personally curated soundtrack. Yet cafes insist on providing music -- often either too old or too new -- that most of their customers can’t hear because their personal music devices are plugged into their ears. And, if the place is crowded, the annoyance of the music is mixed with a general din of voices and chairs scraping and the like. People speaking loudly to be heard on their conference/Skype calls are just about the last straw.

From Proust, I borrowed the idea of lining my exterior walls with cork -- for insulation mostly -- and most of my floors are now cork as well. Otherwise, the walls and ceilings are painted strong, and mostly very dark, neutral colors with an eggshell finish... a look I’ve long admired in magazines. Rather than Selden’s framed prints, I’ve scattered some moderately large, unframed, very colorful, abstract oil paintings against these dark neutral walls. Nothing famous, the work of local “emerging” artists.

My books are now housed in a mishmash of stacking/folding bookcases in a variety of colors and sizes. There are still “walls” of books, but I love the asymmetry of the fixtures. My chairs are all very comfortable in wood or plain upholstery fabric. The dominant piece of furniture is a table (or rather two tables mated together) that can seat eight. The wood for the table tops was cut from a single oak trunk and when the tables are pushed together the grain meshes perfectly. This is my main dining and work table. As I write this, I pause to caress the smooth, rounded edges of this table like a blissed out furniture pervert. There is also a Le Corbusier  LC2 chair in the new, (controversial) brighter RAL colors, that looks splendid on my cork floor. I can't find my exact chair, but here are a few of the other new colors to give you an idea.

My smallish carpet is from Pakistan rather than Turkey. My bedroom contains only one piece of furniture besides the bed, a steamer trunk that houses all my clothes and shoes and much besides.

I like to think that Lily Bart would find it “delicious,” but I know it pleases me.

My apartment is also quiet, surprisingly so since it is in almost every other way unlike Ryecroft’s snug bungalow. First, it is in the downtown of a bustling 21st century city. Second, it shares walls, ceiling, and floor with other units in this building, while this building is surrounded by other residential buildings. And yet mostly what I hear is the cooing of doves and other bird sounds from the garden.

I don’t believe for a moment in Ryecroft’s ideal housekeeper (Mrs. M. as we shall eventually learn). She is the domestic equivalent of the whore with a heart of gold.

What Ryecroft writes about socializing, however, is uncannily accurate. There are people in my apartment maybe twice a year and usually in a group. A book club or a homeowner’s meeting perhaps. I go to other people’s houses more often, but not that much more often.

Letters and newspapers... how quaint. I grew up with both but now I live online. The mere thought of typing out a letter on my old manual (Smith Corona) typewriter (my handwriting is indecipherable even to me) makes me tired. There are people who lament the death of the letter, but I can now conduct a conversation (in text) with friends in Europe, New Zealand, or anywhere else, in real time. It’s true I haven’t actually met some of my best friends, but how different is that from “real” life? There are people I see that I know almost nothing about, and people I know way too much about that I’ve never seen.

I’ll get to the Stoics later.

Next: Spring III. Botany