An evening at home with our new vividly colored living room furniture, the music of Haydn, Kabalesky, Blake and Tviett playing, and the tiny tree, all summer on the back porch but now inside, festooned with tiny lights, twinkling away like a miniature Times Square. My wife working on a crumbling 3D puzzle, emitting words I never, ever hear from her, and I, drawing.
We've not had a evening like this for a while, not watching a movie or in our separate places reading. I attribute it to the new red floral living room set, and the season. The place and the time.
The power of interior design matched with occasion is clearly powerful.
My friend Yori told me about a friend of his, a man in his early fifties, who's been living voluntarily in an austere one room cabin with no indoor plumbing, wood-stove heat, a single extension cord for power, a man well-known in his neighborhood for his carpentry skills and generosity.
Now, it seems, he's renovating another larger cabin so he can live closer to his girl friend. Yori is helping him with wiring. What a change: from relatively ascetic and rigorous to comfort and easy. The space will change his way of life, and he'll wonder, with some alarm perhaps, if who he is is changing as well.
Running yesterday in the drizzly dusk, I stooped to retie my shoe, stood, tipped my head and looked long up at the tree crowns silhouetted against the grey sky. How still it was. Only one leaf waggled madly high up. I thought: I could stay indefinitely in this place, here in the open, listening to the rain and feeling it on my face, watching the light dim. I would be different if I did.
Places--rooms, buildings, open spaces--how you affect us, turning us in on ourselves or opening us out. Your influence is silent and static, except insofar as we move within you, and yet you press on our consciousness in subtle ways, and when we ask that incessant and pressing question, 'Where am I?', your answer insinuates itself into where our wardrobes of self-perception are kept. 'This is what you need to wear in his place.'
Much more than simple extension, than geometry and topology, than points, lines, surfaces and volumes, you are our foil, our mirror, our garment, our freedom. Inside coziness, outside the endless abyss of space, and that of the earth in between, shaped, shape-able, shaping.
Swaddled in tape, the bridge finally stands, and a figurine goat is placed on it, a Billygoat Gruff, to outwit the monsters underneath.
We've not had a evening like this for a while, not watching a movie or in our separate places reading. I attribute it to the new red floral living room set, and the season. The place and the time.
The power of interior design matched with occasion is clearly powerful.
My friend Yori told me about a friend of his, a man in his early fifties, who's been living voluntarily in an austere one room cabin with no indoor plumbing, wood-stove heat, a single extension cord for power, a man well-known in his neighborhood for his carpentry skills and generosity.
Now, it seems, he's renovating another larger cabin so he can live closer to his girl friend. Yori is helping him with wiring. What a change: from relatively ascetic and rigorous to comfort and easy. The space will change his way of life, and he'll wonder, with some alarm perhaps, if who he is is changing as well.
Running yesterday in the drizzly dusk, I stooped to retie my shoe, stood, tipped my head and looked long up at the tree crowns silhouetted against the grey sky. How still it was. Only one leaf waggled madly high up. I thought: I could stay indefinitely in this place, here in the open, listening to the rain and feeling it on my face, watching the light dim. I would be different if I did.
Places--rooms, buildings, open spaces--how you affect us, turning us in on ourselves or opening us out. Your influence is silent and static, except insofar as we move within you, and yet you press on our consciousness in subtle ways, and when we ask that incessant and pressing question, 'Where am I?', your answer insinuates itself into where our wardrobes of self-perception are kept. 'This is what you need to wear in his place.'
Much more than simple extension, than geometry and topology, than points, lines, surfaces and volumes, you are our foil, our mirror, our garment, our freedom. Inside coziness, outside the endless abyss of space, and that of the earth in between, shaped, shape-able, shaping.
Swaddled in tape, the bridge finally stands, and a figurine goat is placed on it, a Billygoat Gruff, to outwit the monsters underneath.
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