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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Looking in Rooms1/21/2008 09:59:14My father is a real estate agent and has spent a career looking in people's houses, as well as their finances, their lives, their marriages, and their aesthetics. When people look for houses, it is often for pressing reasons, the sign of a grander transition, for better or worse, or for the unexpectable new. He has learned an unusual wisdom doing that, one rooted in the power of place and the airy urgency of human property. That, despite our usual unmoved-mover sense of being a self, we are where we are, and we live by what we daily think of having. My mother, when father moved to another place, devoted herself and her finances with perfect relentlessness to keeping the house we'd all lived in, to remaining in place. While he wanted to know that other selves were possible, she needed to believe that she, then and there, still existed. He keeps several homes around the world and spreads time between them, while she cultivates her cathedral—even onto the point that it contradicts its fierce identity: within the time and place, she and her brother who inhabit it together have made a home of timelessness and spacelessness.   For the last two weeks that I've been living in New York, a great deal of my time has been devoted to searching out a place to live. That means many adventures: zipping on my bicycle from neighborhood to neighborhood in Brooklyn and Queens, exploring strange new worlds, and looking inside the homes of people with a room to let. I've learned about the contours of the human geography, as well as the subway lines, the rumors, the advice everyone gives, and the consolation that everyone gives also to someone in my place. I don't take the consolation. Except for one day of hopelessness in the middle, I have loved it. Craigslist classifieds open a world of marvelous variety. Some folks want to rent a room that will be decidedly not home ("a crash pad"), while others want to welcome me into their family. There are the 420-friendly and the no-thank-yous. For some, you must be a professional and workaholic, while for others you've got to be a daring artist with no steady income or conceivable way to pay the rent. And of course (those in the know will know), "East Williamsburg" expands further and further into Bushwick and Bed-Stuy the days edge closer to the first of the month.Finally, yesterday, I found a place. Dulce et decorum est how it all happened.  As my train was grinding slowly over the Williamsburg Bridge, just barely in time before the guy renting it said he'd have to leave, I got filled with a tremendous feeling, sight unseen, that this would be the place. The same feeling surged again when he showed me the room. Nothing special about it, except the feeling that now it is finished. All the other truths and possibilities will reveal themselves in time.
re: Looking in Rooms - 1/23/2008 15:42:29
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