A Place of My Own (8 page)

That jar of Wallace Stevens’s notwithstanding, ever since the day I stumbled on this site it has felt like a place I found rather than chose. Sitting out here on a summer afternoon in this sweet, sweet spot of shade, raising up around me these four imaginary walls and perfecting in imaginary rafters the roof of arching boughs that partially shelters me already, the sense that here is a good place to be, to build, seems a fact fully as real, as given, as the big rock sitting here beside me. How could I ever have doubted it? I may have come to this knowledge the long way around, but now I understood
—knew in my bones!—
what the farmer’s dumbest cow had understood without a moment’s bovine reflection. This is the place.

1.
WORDS

By now you have probably noticed a tendency of mine to lean rather heavily on words and theories in my dealings with the world. How else to account for my inability to pick a spot for a building without recourse to a half-dozen books and three different theories of site selection? And yet it was partly in order to get away from words that I was attracted to the idea of building something with my own hands in the first place.

“Information overload” is something we hear a lot about these days, and there does seem to be a growing sense that technology, the media, and the sheer quantity of information in circulation have somehow gotten between us and reality—what used to be called, without a lot of quotation marks or qualifiers, nature. This may not be a new phenomenon—it was more than a century ago, after all, that Thoreau went to Walden to recover the “hard bottom…we can call reality” from the “mud and slush of opinion” that obscured it—but the situation does seem to have gotten worse. Not only is the mud and slush of opinion a lot thicker now that it’s being piled on by so many different media, but our most famous philosophers (think of Jacques Derrida or Richard Rorty) are telling us that, underneath it all, there may not be any reality to recover—that it’s mud and slush all the way down.

I suffer from an acute case of the contemporary malady, one that probably goes back to a time before people had coined terms like “information overload” and “media saturation” or thought to attach the word “virtual” to “reality.” I remember as a teenager reading that Marshall McLuhan had likened opening the Sunday paper to settling into a warm bath. The metaphor delivered a tiny jolt of recognition, because I too found reading—reading almost anything—to be a vaguely sensual, slightly indulgent pleasure, and one that had very little to do with the acquisition of information. Rather than a means to an end, the deep piles of words on the page comprised for me a kind of soothing environment, a plush cushion into which sometimes I could barely wait to sink my head. More often than not, I could remember almost nothing the moment I lifted myself out of the newspaper or magazine or paperback in which I’d been immersed. Not that I usually bothered to try. Mostly I just let the print wash over me, as if it were indeed warm water, destined to swirl down the drain of my forgetfulness.

So it’s probably not surprising that I should have grown up to be a magazine editor and a writer, someone who might reasonably be described as a professional producer of bathwater for others. But even after long days spent editing copy or writing, I never go anywhere without packing something to read. I’m pained to be caught on the subway without a book or a periodical, and if by accident I should find myself in so naked a state, I’ll commence reading over my seatmate’s shoulder—newspapers, potboilers, bibles swaddled in plastic slipcovers—or I’ll study the back pages of the tabloids arrayed in front of me, a less-than-perfect medium that nevertheless has been the source of most of what I know about sports. I’ll read just about anything, in fact, before I’d even think to glance at the face of the person seated across the car or otherwise engage the parade of humanity before me.

I’m afraid it doesn’t stop there. It’s all I can do to resist the urge to steal a few paragraphs while I’m in the car, pumping gas, or walking down the street (three challenges I’ve met), and even when I’m in social or intimate situations where reading is unquestionably a poor idea. More than once, Judith has caught me as my eyes reached for a line of print right in the middle of a big heart-to-heart.

You can see why I might start to think this was a problem. I began to suspect that the gorgeous columns of words had indeed become a kind of cushion between me and the unwritten world, even a crutch. And then, a few years ago, the tiny voice whispering that I might be missing something spending so much of my time in the tub was amplified by a sentence I read (on the subway, as it happened) in a book by Hannah Arendt, a sentence that kept coming back to me as a kind of rebuke. “Nothing perhaps is more surprising in this world of ours,” the philosopher wrote, “than the almost infinite diversity of its appearances, the sheer entertainment value of its views, sounds, and smells, something that is hardly ever mentioned by the thinkers and philosophers.” At first, this sentence struck me as being poignant, even profound. But then, with this piercing sense of deflation, I realized that anybody who regarded this observation as anything but obvious—as anything but
pathetically
obvious—had a serious problem.

And that included me. To make matters worse, I didn’t have the excuse of being a thinker or a philosopher to fall back on. I was just a magazine editor, a mid-level producer and consumer of bathwater who spent most of his working days neck-deep not only in “the mud and slush of opinion” but in information and statistics, images and arguments, even in
opinions
about opinion—meta—mud and slush, you could say. So perhaps it was inevitable that sooner or later the prospect of doing something more directly involved with the “views, sounds, and smells” of this world would become attractive to me, if not a matter of some therapeutic urgency. Plato, who was of course famously distrustful of all worldly appearances, wrote that in order to open the eyes of the mind we first had to close the eyes of the body. I wanted to go some distance the other way, hoping by a spell of unfamiliar and worldly work to open the eyes of the body, if only by a squinty crack.

Anyone who works with words and symbols every day will know what I’m talking about—it is the same impulse that fills the streams with anglers every April, the nurseries with gardeners, and the hardware stores with do-it-yourself carpenters. Though it turns out the matter is never quite that simple. Because no sooner have you declared your allegiance to some corner of the physical world than you discover a long, alluring shelfful of relevant books and periodicals, word upon word of irresistible how-to that it is suddenly imperative to consult. I confess that part of the appeal for me of first gardening and then carpentry were the vast new uncharted realms of print—the countless books and periodicals and mail-order catalogs—these pastimes opened up for my delectation. It is not easy, getting past words.

Yet that is what I felt a growing desire to do, and what attracted me to making a building in particular. For building seemed to me to be one of the most tangible, and grounded, and factual things that human beings do—the closest we ever come to making something on the order of nature, something with the sheer, incontrovertible presence of a tree or a rock. Instead of turning away from “worldly appearances,” I would see if I couldn’t make one of them myself. The work of building seemed to hold out the promise of at least a partial cure for my addiction to print, for this sense of living at too great a remove from the things of this world and the life of the senses. As it turned out I wasn’t entirely wrong about this, though I was more than a little naïve.

The process of designing my building began with more words, however. The best way I could think of to convey my dream for the place to Charlie was in writing. So a few weeks after I had settled on the site, I wrote him a long letter outlining what I thought my needs were and describing as best I could the building taking shape in my head. The words in this letter, along with all the other words we exchanged in the weeks to come, comprised an informal version of what architects call the program: the list of requirements and wishes that motivates any architectural undertaking. In the simplest terms, the task before Charlie was to design a form—a building—that would mediate between the desires set forth in my words on the one hand, and the facts of the site on the other.

My experience of the site, sitting out there on my chair, approaching the place time and again and considering its prospects, had deepened my sense of the building I wanted. It had begun as a simple, two-dimensional picture, something to improve a view, but by now the image of the building in my mind’s eye had acquired an interior and its own point of view, and it was this that I tried to describe in my letter. There was now a long desk at one end of a rectangular room that faced in the direction of the house, taking in the pond between the trees, the garden, and the path back to the porch. Above the desk I pictured a big window. Visible from the house, this wall would constitute the building’s most public face, though I pictured the door going on the opposite wall, where it wouldn’t interfere with the desk; putting it on the back wall would also force you to walk around the big rock before entering the building, which seemed like a good way to approach it.

Sitting there at my imaginary desk, mentally swiveling around in my chair, I considered what else I wanted in the room. Plenty of bookshelves. A stove of some kind. A place for Judith to sit. Also high on the list was a daybed—a cozy spot to read or snooze. But how do you make a cozy spot in a one-room hut? I pictured the daybed carved into a thick wall, a niche enveloped by bookshelves or cabinets. My image here probably came from Monticello, which I’d recently visited. Jefferson sandwiched his bed in between two rooms, so that it forms a deep, snug pocket in the wall, which he could enter from either side. I had only one room to work with here—this had to be a simple building, I stressed to Charlie, if I was going to build it myself. (The word “simplicity” appears several times in the letter, usually underlined.) But what if we made one of the walls abnormally thick? The depth of a bookcase, say. This would give us a space the daybed could be fitted into, creating at least a partial sense of enclosure. A thick wall or two would also provide plenty of spaces to hold my books and other things. Part of my image of this place was that it would be meticulously organized, with everything I required built in or easily stowed—“boatlike,” is how I put it in the letter to Charlie. There was no question that my streamlined new workspace was conceived under the sign of Getting Organized.

“I picture a space no bigger than it has to be,” I wrote in the letter, “single in purpose and shipshape, with a specific, dedicated place for everything. We should think of the interior less as a room, in fact, than as a piece of furniture, or maybe a cockpit.” I emphasized that the wall unit needn’t be fancy—that it might even be part of the building’s frame, use its plywood sheathing for its back. Thick walls would also serve to warm up the room, it seemed to me, by creating an intermediate space, a kind of buffer, between the inside and the outside of the building. This might make the place feel somewhat less exposed than you would expect a hut set out in the woods to feel, give it a stronger sense of refuge.

Yet there was something a little odd about this wish for thick walls, because at the same time I entertained what seemed like a completely contradictory image of the building as a place radically open to the landscape—as a room that, by virtue of its size and site, could be on far more intimate terms with nature than the house was. I asked Charlie for lots of operable windows—at least one on each wall—and even a small porch or deck where I might sit outside and read when it got too warm indoors. I guess I had very different winter and summer images of the place. Charlie would have to sort this out.

Outside, I pictured wood shingles instead of the crisp clapboards that clad the house; shingles seemed better suited to the wooded site and suggested a softer, shaggier, and generally more inviting building. And in spite of some of the fairly complicated elements I’d asked for inside, my letter emphasized that the look of the building from the outside should be plain and unselfconscious, “more chicken coop than atelier.” Then, in what would prove to be an unanswered prayer, I suggested a very rough budget and invoked the principle of simplicity one last time (“remember: something an idiot can build”) before dropping the letter in the mail.

I had no idea what Charlie would make of it. On one level, the letter seemed to describe a plausible-sounding place; a novelist could probably construct a coherent fictional room out of the words in my letter. But a carpenter? I wasn’t so sure. The letter contained several fairly precise images of the building, yet they were all unconnected, just bits and pieces: Here was a corner with a tiny woodstove and a stuffed chair pulled up to it; over there, on one side of the desk, a small window completely filled with the face of the big rock. Then here
—some
where—was this thick wall of bookcases that was going to organize my life, like a second brain. And over there was the daybed, from which I wanted to look out on the meadow and yet at the same time feel perfectly snug. I might be able to write a logical transition from one image to the next, but could anybody begin to draw it?

Just for the hell of it, I decided to try. I drew a rectangle and started filling it up with all the different elements I’d mentioned: the desk, the daybed, the stove, the thick wall, the door, the various windows, and, hanging somewhere off of the rectangle, the porch. Very soon I ran out of walls and corners, and had begun to add on more rectangles, even to contemplate a second story. I had drawn what amounted to a pile-up of architectural notions loosely contained by a couple of rectangles; I couldn’t even begin to picture what the exterior of such a structure would look like. Like my letter, my drawing was little more than a collage made up of wishes and remembered places, pictures I’d seen and things I’d read. The letter at least had a bit of syntax to keep it from flying apart.

How would an architect go about turning these words into a building? The question began to intrigue me, so when I phoned Charlie to alert him to the letter, I asked if he would be willing to let me somehow observe the process—talk to him about it along the way, and maybe even drive up to Boston to watch him draw. At first Charlie sounded game. But a few moments later, after I’d tried to engage him in a discussion of some theoretical issue in architecture I’d been reading about, he seemed to pull back. Charlie cautioned that watching him design my building wasn’t necessarily going to give me a fair picture of contemporary architecture, if that’s what I was looking for. “Just as long as you realize that what I do doesn’t have too much to do with all that stuff.”