From time to time in this blog, I’d like to share favorite books about home. If you like my suggestions, you could read the book, and make comments. We could have an on-line book club some day.
I’ll start with one favorite titled: Home: A Short History of An Idea by Witold Rybcznski. If I had to pick out two sentences that summarized what fascinated me it would be these. “ Life was a public affair, and just as one did not have a strongly developed self-consciousness, one did not have a room of one’s own.” “ The interior furniture of houses appeared together with the interior furniture of minds.”
The author is a professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania who reports on the emergence of the concept of today’s “home” with a walk through five centuries in England, Europe, and the United States. In the process, he explores how the development of the physical thing that we call house and home runs in parallel with the development of the concept of privacy and our own awareness of our interior private world.
One clear example is privacy of the bedroom and sexuality or lack thereof. Imagine doing a tour of the fourteenth century and being welcomed into a typical home for an evenings stay. You might be quite uncomfortable – physically and emotionally. There weren’t separate bedrooms, just one big hall. You might sleep in a chest or an upturned table. Real beds were very large – ten feet square. Four couples could sleep next to each other. Almost anyone slept anywhere. Children might be with parents or strangers.
Three hundred years later, in the seventeenth century, you might be more comfortable as the march toward new concepts of home, family, and privacy were advancing across northern Europe. Valerie Suransky Polakow, in the book titled: Erosion of Childhood, identifies this as a watershed time for a new notion of childhood. The idea that childhood was a developmental stage that lasted beyond the age of seven was a whole new way of thinking. Until this idea emerges, children of all classes were pretty much considered adults at the age of seven and often sent off to work, apprenticeships, or in service to the church or military.
More intimate spaces were developing, separating public and private areas. Sleeping arrangements were changing. Several historians of home furnishings have discussed the idea that the awareness of a concern about the interior of the home – furnishings, privacy, beauty — is much deeper than a material shift. In reality, it is an external manifestation of the development of the inner life of the person as individuals, as a couple and as a family.
It makes sense to me that there is this type of relationship between our inner world and our physical world. This is how our consciousness evolves. As Churchill said, “First we shape our buildings, and then they shape us.” We draw something out of ourselves as we create our homes. Then we can see that reality, and we begin to notice new possibilities or things that weren’t intended. We are influenced by what we have created. Then we begin tweaking or totally redesigning something new again.
We’ve been in our home for over thirty years and every room has had multiple makeovers reflecting the changes in our lives, family, the times, our needs, our resources, our aspirations for living and our view of the world. These changes profoundly affect us and our children in unseen ways.
My six-year-old daughter astonished us when we created a rite of passage when she was about to start kindergarten many years ago. We allowed her to decorate her bedroom (within certain rules) with her own ideas. After much thought and many ideas she announced her decision one day. “I want the world on my walls. I want a Sphinx and Pyramid, a Native American and tipi, a dolphin and Hawaii, a Korean woman and building…We’ll make stencils for them.”
We asked her how she knew about all these things and where she got the idea. Looking rather surprised she said, “Well you talk about them all the time, and you have pictures, but I want stencils.” I wasn’t quite sure what she meant but loved what she said.
Later, talking with my husband about this as we sat in the living room after she was asleep, my eyes drifted around the room. I was shocked to discover I have a room with the world on my walls. There was my papyrus print, a silk drawing of the Great Wall of China, a painting of the Greek Parthenon, a tapestry from Venice, and a painted plate from Mexico.
I hadn’t set out to put the world on my walls. I just had found things that were meaningful and beautiful to me. It turned out to be the world. My inner world was revealed in the physical plane and our daughter’s inner world was influenced by that.
What do your walls reveal about you?
Inspire your inner world.
© Margaret Lulic 2011
Inspired Home Coach available nationally by phone, Skype, iChat
Author: Home — Inspired by Love and Beauty
The Examined Life: http://www.lulicbooks.com
Image via Wikipedia
Image via Wikipedia
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