Home: A Short History of an Idea

Rybczynski, Witold (Penguin Books, New York, 1986)

I am sitting in a creaky old swivel-type wooden armchair of the sort that used to be found in newspaper offices; it has l a battered foam cushion. When I use the telephone, I tilt back and feel like Pat O'Brien in The Front Page. Since the chair is on casters, I can roll around and reach the books, magazines, papers, pencils, and paperclips that surround me. Everything necessary is close to hand, as in any well-organized workplace, whether it is a writer's room or the cockpit of a jumbo jet. Of course, the kind of organization required to write a book is not the same as is needed to fly a plane. Although some writers find comfort in a neatly organized desk, my own is covered three-deep with a jumble of halfopened books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, magazines, sheets of paper, and newspaper clippings. Finding something in this precarious pile is like playing pick-up-sticks. As the work progresses, the pile grows taller and the open space on which I write shrinks further. Even so, there is comfort in this confusion; only when a chapter is finished, and my desk is once again immaculately empty, do I feel a sense of unease. Like a blank page, a neat desk can intimidate.

Hominess is not neatness. Otherwise everyone would live in replicas of the kinds of sterile and impersonal homes that appear in interior-design and architectural magazines. What these spotless rooms lack, or what crafty photographers have carefully removed, is any evidence of human occupation. In spite of the artfully placed vases and casually arranged art books, the imprint of their inhabitants is missing. These pristine interiors fascinate and repel me. Can people really live without clutter? How do they stop the Sunday papers from spreading over the living room? How do they manage without toothpaste tubes and half-used soap bars in their bathrooms? Where do they hide the detritus of their everyday lives?

Many personal mementos, photographs and objects-reliquaries of family, friends, and career-fill my study. A small gouache of a young man-myself-seated in a Formentera doorway. A sepia-colored photograph of a German zeppelin hovering over Boston on the way to Lakehurst. A photograph of my own house under construction. h Gujarati wall hanging. A framed note from a Famous Man. A corkboard, with messages, telephone numbers, visiting cards, yellowing unanswered letters and forgotten bills. A black sweater, some books, and a leather briefcase are Iying on the daybed which stands on the other side of the room. My writing desk is an old one. Although it is not a particularly valuable antique, its elegance recalls a time when letter writing was a leisurely art, carefully performed with pen and ink and blotter. I feel a little ashamed as I scrawl untidy notes on legal pads of cheap yellow paper. On the desk, in addition to the mess of books and papers, are a heavy brass padlock used as a paperweight, a tin can full of pencils, a cast-iron Sioux Indian head bookend, and a silver snuffbox with the likeness of George II on its cover. Did it once belong to my grandfather? I cannot remember. The plastic cigarette box next to it must have-in addition to the prewar Polish marque, it carries his initials.

Personal possessions, a chair, a desk-a place to write. Not much has changed in over four hundred years. Or has it? Durer's subject was a hermit, so it was natural to show him working alone, but it was unusual for someone in the sixteenth century to have his own room. It was more than a hundred years later that rooms to which the individual could retreat from public view came into being-they were called "privacies." So, although the title of the engraving refers to this as a "study," it was really a room with many uses, all of them public. In spite of the calm that is present in this masterly picture, the type of quiet and seclusion that we normally associate with a writer's workplace would have been impossible. Houses were full of people, much more so than today, and privacy was unknown. Moreover, rooms did not have specialized functions; at noon, the writing stand was put away and the householders sat around the table and had their meal. In the evening the table was taken apart and the long bench became a settee. At night, what now served as a living room was turned into a bedroom. There is no bed visible in this particular engraving, but in other versions Durer showed the scholar writing on a small lectern, and using his bed as a seat. If we could sit down on one of the back-stools it would not be long before we would begin to fidget. The seat cushion does offer some padding against the hard, flat wood, but this is not a chair to relax in.

Dürer's room contains a few tools-an hourglass, a pair of scissors, and a quill pen-but no machines or mechanical devices. Although glass manufacturing had progressed far enough that the large windows were a useful source of light during the day, after nightfall the candles were brought down from the shelf. Writing became impossible, or at least uncomfortable. Heating was primitive. Houses in the sixteenth century had a fireplace or cookstove only in the main room, and no heating in the rest of the house. In winter, this room with its heavy masonry walls and stone floor was extremely cold. Voluminous clothing, such as Jerome wore, was not a requisite of fashion but a thermal necessity, and the old scholar's hunched posture was an indication not only of piety but also of chilliness.

I too am bent over my writing, not in front of a writing stand but before the amber phosphor screen of a word processor. Instead of the scratching of a quill on parchment, I can hear faint clicks, and occasional purring sounds as words are transferred from my own mind to the machine, and from the machine's memory to the plastic disks on which they are recorded. This machine, which, we are led to believe, will revolutionize the way we live, has already affected literature-it has restored quiet to the act of writing. One thing noticeably missing in old pictures of people writing are wastepaper baskets; paper was much too valuable to be thrown away, and a writer had to edit in his head. In that sense we have come full circle, for the word processor has done away with the crumpling of paper. Instead, I press a button, the screen flickers, and the deed is done; the unwanted words disappear into an electronic shredder. It has a calming effect.

So, in fact, a great deal has changed in the home. Some of the changes are obvious-the advances in heating and lighting that are due to new technology. Our sitting furniture has become much more sophisticated, better adapted to relaxation. Other changes are more subtle-the way that rooms are used, or how much privacy is afforded by them. Is my study more comfortable? The obvious answer is yes, but if we were to ask Durer, we might be surprised by his reply. To begin with, he would not understand the question. "What exactly do you mean by comfortable?" he might respond in puzzled curiosity.

The word "comfortable" did not originally refer to enjoyment or contentment. Its Latin root was confortare-to strengthen or console-and this remained its meaning for centuries. We use it this way when we say "He was a comfort to his mother in her old age." It was in this sense that it was used in theology: the "Comforter" was the Holy Spirit. Along the way, "comfort" also acquired a legal meaning: in the sixteenth century a "comforter" was someone who aided or abetted a crime. This idea of support was eventually broadened to include people and things that afforded a measure of satisfaction, and "comfortable" came to mean tolerable or sufficient-one spoke of a bed of comfortable width, although not yet of a comfortable bed. This continues to be the meaning of the expression "a comfortable income"- ample but not luxurious. Succeeding generations expanded this idea of convenience, and eventually "comfortable" acquired its sense of physical well-being and enjoyment, but not until the eighteenth century, long after Durer's death. Sir Walter SCOK was one of the first novelists to use it this new way when he wrote, "Let it freeze without, we are comfortable within." Later meanings of the word were almost exclusively concerned with contentment, often of a thermal variety: "comforter" in secular Victorian England no longer referred to the Redeemer, but to a long woolen scarf; today it describes a quilted bed coverlet.

Words are important. Language is not just a medium, like a water pipe, it is a reflection of how we think. We use words not only to describe objects but also to express ideas, and the introduction of words into the language marks the simultaneous introduction of ideas into the consciousness. As JeanPaul Sartre wrote, "Giving names to objects consists in moving immediate, unreflected, perhaps ignored events on to the plane of reflection and of the objective mind.''1 Take a word like "weekend," which originated at the end of the nineteenth century. Unlike the medieval "weekday" that distinguished the days that one worked from the Lord's Day, the profane "weekend"-which originally described the period when shops and businesses were closed-came to reflect a way of life organized around the active pursuit of leisure. The English word, and the English idea, has entered many languages in unchanged form (le weekend, el weekend, das weekend). Another example. Our grandparents inserted paper rolls into their player pianos. As far as they were concerned, the piano and the piano roll formed part of the same machine. We, on the other hand, draw a distinction between the machine and the instructions that we give it. We call the machine hardware, and to describe the instructions we have invented a new word, "software." This is more than jargon; the word represents a different way of thinking about technology. Its addition to the language marks an important moment.

The appearance of the word "comfort" in the context of domestic well-being is similarly of more than lexicographic interest. There are other words in the English language with this meaning-"cozy," for instance-but they are of later origin. The first use of "comfort" to signify a level of domestic amenity is not documented until the eighteenth century. How to explain this tardy arrival? It is said that the Canadian Inuit have many words to describe a wide variety of types of snow. Like sailors, who have an extended vocabulary to describe the weather, they need to differentiate between new snow and old, hard-packed and loose, and so on. We have no such need, and we call it all "snow." On the other hand, crosscountry skiers, who do need to distinguish between different snow conditions, do so by referring to the different colors of ski wax: they speak of purple snow or blue snow. These are not exactly new words, but they do represent an attempt to refine the language to meet a special need. In a similar way, people began to use "comfort" in a different way because they needed a special word to articulate an idea which previously had either not existed or had not required expression.