On Finding, Making, and Naming "Home"
Visit to the Kreeger Museum
In my last letter I wrote to you, I talked about my revisit to a favorite place, Dripp Coffee Bar in my last return to California. It is a treasure chest of memory. Places are keep-safes for who you were at a moment in time. In that way, it seems to me that a place signals what was important.
So it is this sentiment that prepared me to be struck by a passage from Alain de Botton’s book, The Architecture of Happiness.
He writes,
“We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our building to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves” (2006, p. 107).
(We can pardon the British English.)
Places are things for storage, emotionally or physically speaking, and they are also reflections or reminders. And it was the next passage that helped to re-teach me an old word: home.
Home
He writes,
“in turn, those places whose outlook matches and legitimates our own, we tend to honour with the term ‘home’. Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of a home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner” (2006, p. 107).
That is a serious thing. It is also intuitive, to some extent. This is the step that makes it such that you can feel at home with a person, someone special to you, or that you can be one for someone else (“I feel at home when I’m with you” or “home is where the heart is”).
I can appreciate this sense of honoring a place and the limitlessness of hope here: homes do not have to be permanent places of belonging. I don’t think that’s totally true, however. I think there is profound value and benefit from having a secured place of being.
When I did my 100 days of solo-travel through Europe, I remember reaching a specific point where I simply “wanted to go home” despite having the time of my life. It felt like I simply could not process any more of the newness or change that travel brings. Despite writing a book during that time, it simply was not enough to process on the go.
Even then, this was during the wave of displaced Syrians fleeing their home. If home “can be anywhere,” surely displacement or exile would be much less painful. Furthermore, if one (person or country) truly believed that home could be anywhere, it seems one would be much more hospitable to expats and refugees. But I digress.
The honoring of a place with the word “home” seems like a rich question to explore at some point, but it got me thinking. And I adore the idea that buildings reflect yourself, your values and ethics.
It is this exploration of home that brought me to realize something obvious. One of my favorite places was a home. Literally. It was in fact designed as a home with the intention to later be converted into a museum for the public to enjoy.
The Kreeger Museum
I am talking about, of course, The Kreeger Museum. It is stunning. I have mentioned it before, at least in the last winter break and in reflection of the 100-Day writing project that kicked off this letter series. I hope to understand more fully what exactly about it is striking to me. And, as I say that, I realize there is no need to say “to me.” That which is striking, at all, is a matter of who you are.
What is it that I admire of this place? I think of three things.
1) Stillness
Firstly, it is the stone. The building overall but specifically the backyard terrace and reflection pool are made of a loud granite. What is it about this place? What it could be is that it is a material I am almost never around. I don’t have that option to explore or touch these types of stone much, I suppose, but it seems to signal something to me.
That is, in them, I read a profound stillness. It is the sentiment (or, maybe poetically, sediment) of resolve. This is a final form of moveability and reforming: the stone is set. It is heavy such that it is a law unto itself, and one is invited here all the same. There are visitors in this place. You are welcome here. I would tell you this: it is an easier step to take in places like this. I walk stronger. I walk slower.
It is also the cut of the stone that I regard. It is made spacious as a terrace and by the pool. There is room and a kind of minimal touch to it. On the other side of the balance, there are the marble-like statues across the terrace. They accentuate the scene. They hold so much optical weight on the otherwise open space and brilliantly contrast the white with black. I am moved to each.
2) Autonomy
Next is the library. It is a wall of books that looks out through the wall of glass and over the granite patio. I imagine the scene: a calm, foggy morning, a beautiful moment that DC does so well, as the day hides its abundance.
It is the possibility of secluded inspiration and time controlled in solitude. I mean controlled here with the sense of “autonomy.” It’s hard to imagine rushing somewhere, other than to a new idea, in this space. For that matter, I don’t get the sense it is possible to do things that are “in the way” of happy tranquility here. This space is dedicated. I see the pauses of moments here; they hang in the air like rest notes in music, the punctuated breath of ease and intrigue.
Apart from the metaphysical values I respect here, I simply love a big home library.
3) Warmth
And to balance this, or alternative to this sense of elected privacy, there is my 3rd favorite thing of this place. There is an area for having others. When I took a tour in one of my last visits, I heard probably 3 or 4 different times that “this room was meant for hosting” sometimes either before dinner or after dinner, even dinner itself (!?), or maybe just a guest dropping by for coffee.
It’s a beautiful and simple thing to have space for others in your life.
I think of this former house in relation to my own.
Returning
I once wrote to you sharing about my own humble setup. Then, I was aware of the priority that one shows through what furniture they have and learned how home is an expression of self-love. Here, I am aware of how deeply that can go when starting a building from scratch and shaping your own dwelling to match your mood or ethics.
I send you back with one more moment from de Botton’s book. He writes:
“Our working routines may be frantic and compromised, dense with meetings, insincere handshakes, small-talk and bureaucracy… But, finally, on our own, looking out of the hall window onto the garden and the gathering darkness, we can slowly resume contact with a more authentic self, who was there waiting in the wings for us to end our performance. Our submerged playful sides will derive encouragement from the painted flowers on either side of the door. The value of gentleness will be confirmed by the delicate folds of the curtains. Our interest in a modest, tender-hearted kind of happiness will be fostered by the unpretentious raw wooden floorboard. The materials around us will speak to us of the highest hopes we have for ourselves. In this setting, we can come close to a state of mind marked by integrity and vitality. We can feel inwardly liberated. We can, in a profound sense, return home” (2006, p.119).
Artfully said.
More soon,
Trevor
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Good stuff Trev!