A Place of My Own

by Michael Pollan

  Joe and I worked methodically and well, achieving an easy collaboration on many of those early spring days. I began to feel less like a helper than a partner, and we traded off tasks depending on our mood rather than on the likelihood of my screwing up something important. I noticed that my finish nails seldom bent anymore (a good thing, too, when you’re nailing lengths of clear pine that cost $2 a linear foot), and the circular saw had lost its ability to startle me with short cuts or seize-ups. My grasp of wood behavior was daily growing surer, and I’d internalized all of Joe’s sawing saws, which now played in my head like a cautionary mantra: Measure twice cut once, consider all the consequences, remember to count the kerf (the extra eighth of an inch removed by the saw blade itself). As I grew more confident about making field decisions, phone calls to Charlie became infrequent, until one day, concerned about the long spell of radio silence from the job site, Charlie called me to see if there was anything we needed. Not that I could think of; we were rolling along. Some days I even got to be the head carpenter in charge, Joe manning the chop saw while I called for lengths of lumber. What it felt like now was a pretty good job, one poised on that fine-point where it is no longer daunting yet still reliably supplies days of novelty and challenge. The hours slipped by, and the end of each workday brought the satisfaction of markable progress and the solidifying conviction that this building was going to get done.

  Our happy march down the punch list came to a sudden halt one evening late that spring, when Joe phoned to say he’d broken his hand at work and wouldn’t be able to work for three months, possibly longer. He’d been carrying a long stack of two-by-eights when the lumber bumped into something and spasmed, wrenching his hand so far backward that it shattered his metacarpal bone. The doctors had screwed a steel plate to the back of his hand to hold the bone together and warned him not to use it for at least three months. “The only good thing about this I can think of,” Joe’d said, bleakly, “is that now I can slip a .45 through an airport metal detector.”

  I automatically assumed that work on the building would simply halt until Joe’s hand was healed. But then I decided that would be just too pathetic. Was I still so dependent on Joe? Of the finish work left to do, I could think of very little that required two men; whatever tools I still needed could be borrowed. I decided that the only self-respecting way to interpret Joe’s injury was as a sign it was time to be working on my own.

  So the next morning I set to work, solo, if not exactly alone. I started out with easy stuff, cutting lengths of number-two pine on the chop saw and nailing them to the wall beneath my desk, which promised to hide any mistakes in its shadow. But this work went so smoothly that I decided, what the hell, why don’t you see if you can’t figure out how to trim a window. And this is what I set out to do the following day, working at a pace so excruciatingly deliberate it would undoubtedly have gotten me fired had I not been the boss. But turtling through the work as I did seemed in itself an accomplishment for me, to lay by my ordinary haste and move through a single day as a more patient and deliberate kind of person. I talked to myself the whole time, too, narrating the play-by-play in a rapt murmur I recognized from televised golf.

  The syntax of window trim is sternly inflexible, and I reviewed each step of the procedure aloud as if giving instructions to a child, making absolutely sure to cut and nail each trim piece according to the stipulated chronology: skirt first; stool, or sill, on top of that; then a molding up each side; and finally a crown piece butt-jointed across the top of those. By the end of the day I had one perfectly respectable windowsill to my credit, and, between my ears, this gigantic, brain-crowding balloon of pride.

  After successfully trimming out another window or two, I found I could get the job done without the chorus of supervisory voices, and my thoughts took their accustomed more speculative turn. The better part of one afternoon I spent trying to decide whether trim was the italics of building, serving to underscore a window or door, or, since trim was also used to bridge dissimilar surfaces and gloss over mistakes, was it instead the transitional phrase—one of those clauses that allows a writer to leap from one idea to another, covering over gaps in logic or narrative with a few cheap words? I concluded trim could be either.

  My building had little if any italic trim, and a minimum of transitional or glossing-over trim, certainly fewer pieces of it than there were mistakes in need of forgiveness. As I nailed narrow strips of pine to the window casings, covering the gap between casing and post, I passed the time considering the relationship between trim and human fallibility. To trim, I decided, is human, which probably explains the modernists’ contempt for it. Because if we’re not using trim to hide our poor craftsmanship, we’re using it to proclaim our fine craftsmanship—either way, sloth or pride, trim embodies the most human of failings and thereby spoils the supreme objectivity that modernists strove for.

  The machine was supposed to allow us to dispense with trim altogether, by achieving perfect joints beyond the skill of any craftsman. In practice, however, the seamless, untrimmed interior proved as elusive as most other modernist goals: To build to the exacting tolerances seamlessness demanded was prohibitively expensive. The real world holds a powerful brief for trim, it seems. Many modernists also found themselves forced back on the rhetorical possibilities of trim as a way to help “express” the structure of their buildings when simply revealing it wasn’t a realistic option. Mies decided to trim the exterior of the Seagram building with purely decorative I-beams when the building code forced him to cake the real ones in layers of unsightly fire retardant.

  But even in places where the ideal of trimlessness has been realized, many people have sensed something cold, if not inhuman, in the achievement. Trim seems to speak to our condition, and not only as mistake-makers. Christopher Alexander suggests that its deeper purpose may be to provide a bridge between the simple shapes and proportions of our buildings and a human realm of greater complexity and intimacy. By offering the eye a hierarchy of intermediate-sized shapes, finish trim helps us to make a comfortable perceptual transition from the larger-than-life scale of the whole to the familiar bodily scale of windows and doors, all the way down to the intimate scale of moldings as slender as our fingers. The mathematician and chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbroit makes a similar point when he criticizes modernist architecture for failing to bridge the perceptual distance between its “unnaturally” simple forms and the human scale. Mandelbroit suggests that architectural ornament and trim appeal to us because they offer the eye a complex and continuous hierarchy of form and detail, from the exceedingly fine to the massive, that closely resembles the complex hierarchies we find in nature—in the structure of a tree or a crystal or an animal.

  Though plainly not a modernist building, my writing house did exhibit a couple of puzzlingly modernist features: its more or less transparent structure, for example, and its relative lack of trim. But if Alexander and Mandelbroit were right, then the building’s own modest scale, as well as the intricate hierarchy of detail that organizes its structure—from the big corner posts to the midsize fin walls down to the exposed three-quarter-inch edge of their plywood faces—meant there was no need for trim to provide transitions from one scale to another or to complexify a shape that would otherwise have seemed “unnaturally” simple. The building was human enough without it.

  Nor was Charlie particularly concerned that Joe and I hide our every mistake behind a piece of trim. On the subject of error he liked to quote Ruskin, who had defended the craftsman against the inhumanity of the machine by declaring that “No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.” No misunderstandings here. One time when I asked Charlie whether or not I should install a piece of trim over one particularly unfortunate gap that a mistake of mine had breached between a fin wall and the desk, he argued against it on the grounds trim here would be too finicky. “It’s okay for a building like this to have a few holidays,
” he explained, employing a euphemism for error I’d never heard before; I suppose it has to do with taking the occasional day off from the reigning standards of workmanship, a most human thing to want to do. “Holiday?!” Joe roared when I passed on the comment. “I’ve got some news for Charlie: This building’s a fuckin’ Mardi Gras!”

  WOOD, FINISHED

  One last thing about trim: You don’t ordinarily find it in furniture, since it’s customary in furniture making to hallow rather than obscure the joinery. I mention this because as I worked at finishing my building’s surfaces that summer, I came to see that the whole notion of furniture had more to do with the design and finish of my writing house than I’d ever imagined. I realized that its lack of trim and transparency of structure had less to do with the aesthetic of the Bauhaus than that of the furniture maker, who characteristically strives to make the decorative and the structural one—not by suppressing the decorative, but by elaborating and refining, almost lovingly, his structures. The furniture maker strives to emphasize the beauty of his joints, to highlight the ingenious ways a piece fits together and conveys its weight to the ground, and to bring out the inherent qualities of its materials with his painstakingly handworked finishes.

  This last labor consumed me for a great many of those Joeless days, as I sanded and oiled all the interior surfaces of my building, a task so vast it made me feel like a mouse trying single-handedly to refinish an armoire. The sanding alone took me over every inch of the interior four separate times: first with the belt sander, to remove the saw marks and lumberyard inks, and thrice more with the palm sander, each time applying a finer and finer grit, until the grain rose up brightly from the muffled surface of blemishes, sanding marks, and pith. Each coat of tung oil required another circumnavigation of the interior, and there were two coats everywhere but on the desk, which received a third and a fourth. Lastly there were the once-overs with steel wool, to remove the tack between coats of oil.

  Once I’d acquired the proper frame of mind, or maybe I should say mindlessness, I found finishing to be an exquisite form of drudgery, especially after I’d laid all my power tools aside and taken up the oil cloth. Bringing nothing more than my hands to the task, I slowly rubbed and pressed the wood as if it were muscled flesh, over and over again in a widening spiral of attention. And after a few hours it did begin to feel like some weird interspecies form of massage. The backs of these boards, far from being inanimate, responded to my touch, absorbing the oils and then admitting the light deep into their grain until their complexion completely changed, the wood becoming more essentially and emphatically (and yet at the same time somehow less literally) itself.

  Finishing acquainted me with these woods—the species but also the individual boards—in a way nothing we’d done to them until now ever had. Now I knew fir, how the rub of oil elicits its fine salmon hue, and how the small, tight knots in an ordinary two-by-four will fluster the calm sweep of its grain. White pine blushes faintly pink, swirling here and there with nuttier streaks of heartwood, and as the permanent wetting of the oil brought forward the sweeping grain and figuration of my ash, I could make out beneath the desk’s finish what looked like a half-dozen baseball bats flattened out in a kind of Mercator projection. There are boards in this building already as familiar to me as the skin on the back of my hand.

  HABITABLE FURNITURE

  Two and half years ago, when I mentioned to Charlie that I conceived of my building as a piece of furniture, all I had in mind was a particular scale and a tightly ordered, ship-shape layout—certainly not an intricate wooden interior that I would end up sanding and oiling and rubbing every square inch of by hand. But as I went about this work, investing my hours and days in the cultivation of these wood surfaces, I felt like it was indeed a piece of furniture I was finishing and, more, that a piece of furniture was exactly what a “writing house”—a name my building seemed to have grown into—should be. Why this should be so I didn’t have a clue. Now I think I do.

  Blame it on the tung oil fumes, but I began to wonder why it is that studies and libraries are so often finished in wood, in fine stocks and handcrafted panels oiled to resemble furniture. It only made sense that Charlie would have adopted this particular idiom for my writing house, since it is after all a study and a home for books. But where did the convention come from in the first place? I found the outlines of an answer in a couple of histories, and what I read suggested that there might be yet another path along which time finds its way into our buildings, working somewhere beneath the consciousness of architects and builders and inhabitants, but shaping our dreams of place all the same.

  The study, it seems, evolved during the Renaissance from a piece of bedroom furniture: the writing desk, escritoire, or secretary, in which a man traditionally kept his ledgers and family documents, usually under lock and key. Personal privacy as we think of it scarcely existed prior to the Renaissance, which is when the wide-open house was first subdivided into specific rooms dedicated to specific purposes; before that time, the locked writing desk was as close to a private space as the house afforded the individual. But as the cultural and political currents of the Renaissance nourished the new humanist conception of self as a distinct individual, there emerged a new desire (at least on the part of those who could afford it) for a place one might go to cultivate this self—for a room of one’s own. The man acquired his study, and the woman her boudoir.

  Probably the first genuinely private space in the West, the Renaissance study was a small locked compartment that adjoined the master bedroom, a place where no other soul set foot and where the man of the house withdrew to consult his books and papers, manage the household accounts, and write in his diary. Exactly when such rooms became commonplace is hard to date precisely, though under the OED’s entry for the word “study,” there is a citation from 1430 that would argue for the fifteenth century at the latest: “He passed from chambre to chambre tyle he come yn his secret study where no creature used to come but his self allone.”

  In Renaissance Italy such a room was called a studiolo, which happens to be the same word used to denote a writing desk; at about the same time the French began to use the word cabinet to denote a kind of room as well as a locked wooden box. These spaces “grew from an item of furniture to something like furniture in which one lives,” I read in Philippe Ariès’s five-volume A History of Private Life. The new room was essentially the old piece of furniture writ large, an escritoire blown up to habitable dimensions. It was only natural that the new space would preserve the wooden finishes and intricate detailing of its precursor, so that the interiors of a study came to look a lot like the interior of a rolltop desk as seen by, say, a mouse.

  I found it uncanny, and somehow almost moving, that this particular bit of history could have inscribed itself on my building without so much as a conscious thought from Charlie or me. But I suppose this is how it usually goes with our buildings: history will have its way with them, whether their architects and builders are historically minded or not. So it happens that every library or study that’s ever been finished in wood has as its ancestor the escritoire or studiolo, and that the scent of masculinity given off by rooms paneled in dark wood—men’s clubs, smoking parlors, speakeasies—has its source in the exclusively male preserve of the study. Here then was yet another sense in which our spaces are wedded ineluctably to our history, to times that, though we may have long ago forgotten them, our buildings nonetheless remember.

  Perhaps the most famous and influential of all Renaissance studies was the one belonging to Michel de Montaigne. In 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, Montaigne retired from public life—he’d practiced law in Bordeaux, serving for a time as the city’s magistrate—to his country estate, where he began to spend the better part of his days in a circular library on the third floor of a tower. Here he read rather aimlessly, jotted down his thoughts now and again, and eventually invented a new literary genre that he decided, with characteristic modesty, to call an “at
tempt,” or essay.

  Just what the architectural setting might have had to do with the literary achievement—the new space with the new voice—is impossible to say with certainty. But whenever Montaigne wrote about his study it was in terms that suggested there was a close connection in his mind between the place and the project, a project that has been likened to an exploration of the newly discovered continent of the self.

  “When at home I slip off a little more often to my library,” he tells us in an essay, “On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse” (being alone with his books is his favorite), “which I like for being a little hard to reach and out of the way.” From his tower library, encircled by his books and “three splendid and unhampered views,”

  it is easy for me to oversee my household…I am above my gateway and have a view of my garden, my chicken-run, my backyard and most parts of my house. There I can turn over the leaves of this book or that, a bit at a time without order or design. Sometimes my mind wanders off, at others I walk to or fro, noting down or dictating these whims of mine.

  It’s not hard to find likenesses between the form of the essays and the room in which they took shape. The broad compass of its outlook, the desultory skipping from volume to volume that the bookshelves “curving round me” would have encouraged, the siting of the library such that it allowed Montaigne simultaneously to oversee and withdraw from domestic life—in a great many ways the material facts of Montaigne’s study aligned closely with the habits of a mind that ranged widely, that believed the best way to understand Man was by closely examining the circumference of one man’s experience (his own), and that relished the minutiae of everyday life. (One of my favorite passages in the essays concerns the pleasures of scratching, a topic I would not have expected literature’s first essayist to get around to.) The fact that from his desk Montaigne could see both his books and his household—and it was rare at that time for a study even to have a window—mirrors the characteristic movement of his essays, commuting so easily between the evidences of literature and of life. Montaigne’s tower also provided him a place from which he could see without being seen, allowing him to withdraw from the world and yet still experience a kind of power over it. “There,” he said of his study, “is my throne.”