Whether something is old-fashioned or not doesn’t resolve the question of whether it’s true or not. Continue & Comment
The Home of Enoughness
A face, Loretta Young said, “is like the outside of a house, and most faces, like most houses, give us an idea of what we can expect to find inside.” Our house is 74 years old, built during the Second World War as state housing: good quality housing for the working class. It’s still a good quality house. Rimu doors, matai floors, cupboards that don’t fly open in earthquakes…
A house is the embodiment of the culture which built it, but New Zealand culture has changed. As Bill McKay and Andrea Stevens noted in their book on the New Zealand state house, past and present (Beyond the State: New Zealand State Houses from Modest to Modern), most ex-state houses have been adapted, extended, enlarged. But not all. To quote: “Having lived in the house now for several years, Aaron [Kreisler, ex-state-houseowner] feels he has grown into it. Instead of adapting the house, he has adapted to it.”
There is a fascinating depth to that idea which I would like to delve into. The idea of cutting your coat to suit your cloth is quite passé, but why? What is the allure of indebting yourself in order to increase your space beyond what you actually need? First you spend money on stuff, and then you spend more on enlarging your house to fit it. Why not instead take the house as it is, as your ally in living a life of enoughness?
I feel particularly blessed in that regard, as my house seems to have been neatly designed for enoughness. It’s not an ornate and draughty Victorian behemoth, or an eighties temple to overconsumption, or even a modern there-is-a-house-somewhere-behind-this-garage architectural ode to our cultural dependence on personal vehicular transport. It’s a 1940s row house/terraced house, with a slightly cottagey aesthetic.
One can imagine the first occupants moving into it with the precious furniture that their family managed to hold on to through the Depression, each item carefully tended and given its own place. If there’s one thing that this house would not have seen a lot of in its early days, it’s clutter. Its ‘face’ suggests an interior of comfortable simplicity, an efficiency without sterility, a warm and unpretentious home. Slick modern luxury? No.
McKay and Stevens describe the ex-state house bathroom as “a surprisingly perfunctory space. It is tiny and speaks of a very different attitude to what is seen nowadays as an indulgent daily ritual.” Our very typical bathroom contains a bath, a basin (no stand, it’s attached to the wall) and a toilet, with the sum total of storage provided by a small medicine cabinet set into the wall. If you want to avoid accumulating clutter, the ex-state house bathroom is your friend, the tough no-nonsense kind of friend who will chuck your extra conditioner bottles out the window if you overcrowd the sill.
Storage becomes a bit of a theme in McKay and Stevens’ description. “But the thing you really notice when visiting these houses is how little storage space they had compared with today’s homes. We don’t take up more space, but our stuff seems to; indeed, quite significantly more. A standard-issue wardrobe for these times was about a metre wide. With all the consumer temptations thrown at us today, this would barely be enough for a coat collection.”
On reading this, I immediately thought of what could be construed as my coat collection. I have one winter coat of wool, one jacket ditto, one alleged raincoat (showercoat, more like), and one red velvet coat, plus one large cloak. This seems to me like a lot, but I can assure you, it doesn’t take up half of the wardrobe space which the 1940s have bestowed upon me. Six dresses hang in the same wardrobe, along with a collared shirt, two skirts, my evening wear, an off-season dressing-gown and my wedding dress. And a hanging doohicky which holds scarves, hats, kerchiefs, belts etc. And that’s just the rail. What more do I need?
“’There’s this fascination now for people making their mark with these über-sized houses,’ reflects Aaron, ‘where your kitchen has to be a chef’s kitchen and your bathroom a large walk-in space. [I am happy to say that I have yet to see a bathroom into which one cannot walk. Possibly he is conflating the idea of the large en-suite bathroom and the walk-in wardrobe?] The addiction to spending is huge. We are the generation that is allowed to carry large amounts of debt. And so the state house presents a different set of attitudes about ownership.”
Perhaps that’s something we can use to help ourselves, as our culture careers down the slope of constant-growth consumerism like an out-of-control shopping trolley toward the muddy ditch of debt and buyer’s remorse. If a house speaks to us of the culture that produced it, perhaps we can use the house as a way to reach back to that culture, or rather, a way for that culture to reach out to us.
I can’t help feeling, though, that the past is most likely to reach out and smack us round the head, shouting “what on earth do you need that many clothes for? How many bodies have you got? And what do you mean, his and hers bathrooms? Haven’t you got any bladder control?”
My house is 74, after all, and at that age you’ve got past any awkwardness about asking people embarrassing questions.
How old is your house? And what might it say to you?
Humility
There are times when I am tempted to believe that there are only two kinds of people in this world: those who say they’re humble when they’re not, and those who misunderstand humility altogether and proudly disavow it.
I blame Uriah Heep.
Humility is not insincerity. Nor is it the state of being humiliated. Nor is it badmouthing oneself in order to elicit compliments from others. Humility, as Charles Spurgeon said, is “to make a right estimate of one’s self.” Neither puffed up too high nor grovelling too low, but seeing oneself clearly, as one truly is.
“Humility has nothing to do with depreciating ourselves and our gifts in ways we know to be untrue,” David F Wells wrote in Losing Our Virtue. “Even “humble” attitudes can be masks of pride. Humility is that freedom from our self which enables us to be in positions in which we have neither recognition nor importance, neither power nor visibility, and even experience deprivation, and yet have joy and delight. It is the freedom of knowing that we are not in the center of the universe, not even in the center of our own private universe.”
Oh, the relief! Not being the one fixed point around which the universe endlessly turns really takes a lot of pressure off. As the actor Rupert Graves says, “Not being anxious requires a level of humility, doesn’t it? It does, I think. It’s not all about you.” Humility: cheaper than Valium, and with fewer unpleasant side-effects.
But how do we obtain humility? How do we become humble? Sigmund Freud, somewhat unexpectedly, suggests love may be the answer. “Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.” If you want to be truly humble, mind you, you might want to think about hocking the whole lot.
According to Phillips Brooks, “The true way to be humble is not to stoop until you are smaller than yourself, but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is.” It’s a matter of getting some perspective and seeing things in proportion.
There are, it seems to me, two parts to humility: seeing oneself clearly, and not focussing on oneself. The first requires a certain level of self-examination, and the second – well, doesn’t. Quite the opposite. As with so many things, a balance must be found.
We could do worse than take the example of the ‘well-dressed lady’ who checks herself over in the mirror in the morning and then doesn’t give her appearance another thought for the rest of the day.
The quest for humility is, however, frequently inhibited by one’s culture. Some cultures are all for self-aggrandizement; others mandate a sort of false humility, where the Done Thing is to downplay your abilities and achievements.
Some cultures – take New Zealand, for example – sometimes push this to the point of it being frowned upon to do well, let alone talk about it. Conspicuous success invites hostility. Tall Poppy syndrome, it is called, after the story of Tarquin the Great’s unspoken advice to his son on how to conquer the city of Gabii. Let me tell you, Tarquin Jr wouldn’t know what to do with himself in this, the land of hunchbacked poppies.
As the Maori say, Kāore te kumara e kōrero mō tōna ake reka; the kumara does not say how sweet he is. Be the kumara; don’t be the Heep.