Read Online A Place of My Own by Michael Pollan - Free Book Online
Authors: Michael Pollan
Ads: Link
“Think about it this way,” he suggested. “You’ve been hiking all day, it’s getting late, and you’re looking for a good campsite—just a comfortable, safe-feeling place to spend the night. That’s your site.”
“At a certain season of our life,” Thoreau wrote in Walden , “we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house.” Now I entered my own such season, though I didn’t manage to approach it quite as lightly as Thoreau. (Of course Thoreau was never serious about settling; I was.) The first time I walked the land was a bright June afternoon, the sun directly overhead, and I quickly lost myself in my perambulations. I traced patterns across the property that would have looked antic had Judith or some neighbor happened to notice me, pacing first this way, then that, doubling and then tripling back again, before stopping to appraise a view, a deliberative process that involved a long, slow pirouette through 360 degrees. The second time out, I brought along a chair, planting it in a succession of auspicious-seeming spots, the better to rehearse inhabiting them and observe the landscape’s constantly changing face.
From out here the whole problem of site selection looked somewhat different. I realized I wasn’t just looking for a view, but for something more personal than that—a point of view. What would be my angle on things when I sat down to work? Some spots where I put my chair implied an oblique angle on the world, while others met it more forthrightly. I could see that I was going to have to decide whether I was a person more at home in the shadows, or out in the sunny middle of things. How important to me was the company of a tree, or the reflection of water? Just how available to the gaze of others—on the road, in the house—did I wish the face of my building to be? Some sites I considered offered what seemed like the geographical correlative of shyness, others self-assertion. It was as though the landscape were asking me to declare myself, to say this place, and not that one, suited me, in some sense was me.
And not just for the moment or month or year. (“And there I did live,” Thoreau wrote of the sites he surveyed, “for an hour, a summer and a winter life…”) No, this was for keeps, and there were times when I felt that choosing a site had become a metaphor for every other fateful decision I’d ever had to make, but especially all those ones that went under the decidedly un-Thoreauvian rubric of Settling Down: buying the house, signing the note, getting married, deciding to have the baby, taking the job, giving up the job. (Had Thoreau done any of these things?) None of these decisions had come easy, and yet it helped to remind myself that not one of them had ever given me a moment’s regret either. Maybe I’m the kind of person who just needs to think all his second thoughts in advance. As Thoreau pointed out in Walden , there’s freedom in deliberation (literally: “from freedom”); once that’s over, though, things start looking a good deal more fatelike. Odd as it sounds, there were moments when I felt as though I was picking out not a building site but a cemetery plot—when I felt that sort of bottomless claustrophobia in time.
Which is why I took my sweet time about it, spending uncounted hours walking the property, at every time of day, in every weather, by every conceivable route. I planted my chair in two dozen places, cataloging their qualities, cataloging my responses to their qualities, until I found myself beginning to doubt, in the same way saying a word over too many times can make you doubt its sense, whether I could even say what a place was any longer, what it was that made a place a place. Was I really cataloging their qualities—shyness, forthrightness—or was I inventing them? Was a place something made, in other words, or was it something given?
“Wherever I sat, there I might live,” Thoreau had written of his own
“At a certain season of our life,” Thoreau wrote in Walden , “we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house.” Now I entered my own such season, though I didn’t manage to approach it quite as lightly as Thoreau. (Of course Thoreau was never serious about settling; I was.) The first time I walked the land was a bright June afternoon, the sun directly overhead, and I quickly lost myself in my perambulations. I traced patterns across the property that would have looked antic had Judith or some neighbor happened to notice me, pacing first this way, then that, doubling and then tripling back again, before stopping to appraise a view, a deliberative process that involved a long, slow pirouette through 360 degrees. The second time out, I brought along a chair, planting it in a succession of auspicious-seeming spots, the better to rehearse inhabiting them and observe the landscape’s constantly changing face.
From out here the whole problem of site selection looked somewhat different. I realized I wasn’t just looking for a view, but for something more personal than that—a point of view. What would be my angle on things when I sat down to work? Some spots where I put my chair implied an oblique angle on the world, while others met it more forthrightly. I could see that I was going to have to decide whether I was a person more at home in the shadows, or out in the sunny middle of things. How important to me was the company of a tree, or the reflection of water? Just how available to the gaze of others—on the road, in the house—did I wish the face of my building to be? Some sites I considered offered what seemed like the geographical correlative of shyness, others self-assertion. It was as though the landscape were asking me to declare myself, to say this place, and not that one, suited me, in some sense was me.
And not just for the moment or month or year. (“And there I did live,” Thoreau wrote of the sites he surveyed, “for an hour, a summer and a winter life…”) No, this was for keeps, and there were times when I felt that choosing a site had become a metaphor for every other fateful decision I’d ever had to make, but especially all those ones that went under the decidedly un-Thoreauvian rubric of Settling Down: buying the house, signing the note, getting married, deciding to have the baby, taking the job, giving up the job. (Had Thoreau done any of these things?) None of these decisions had come easy, and yet it helped to remind myself that not one of them had ever given me a moment’s regret either. Maybe I’m the kind of person who just needs to think all his second thoughts in advance. As Thoreau pointed out in Walden , there’s freedom in deliberation (literally: “from freedom”); once that’s over, though, things start looking a good deal more fatelike. Odd as it sounds, there were moments when I felt as though I was picking out not a building site but a cemetery plot—when I felt that sort of bottomless claustrophobia in time.
Which is why I took my sweet time about it, spending uncounted hours walking the property, at every time of day, in every weather, by every conceivable route. I planted my chair in two dozen places, cataloging their qualities, cataloging my responses to their qualities, until I found myself beginning to doubt, in the same way saying a word over too many times can make you doubt its sense, whether I could even say what a place was any longer, what it was that made a place a place. Was I really cataloging their qualities—shyness, forthrightness—or was I inventing them? Was a place something made, in other words, or was it something given?
“Wherever I sat, there I might live,” Thoreau had written of his own
Similar Books
