The Hermit Hut
The best thing I’d done for myself as a waiter was to have the cheap polyester tux we all had to wear tailored shortly after starting.
question 1: verticality and psychology
“bachelard describes the attic as rational and the cellar as irrational—the mind split between light and dark. how do you see that play out in people’s creative or moral lives? what’s your own ‘cellar’ like?”
question 2: the house as imagination
“he says a house shelters daydreaming—while chee, as a waiter, peers into other people’s houses, seeing their unguarded lives. do you think the homes we build protect our inner selves or reveal them?”
question 3: class, boredom, and creation
“chee says waiting tables educated his imagination beyond his class; kingsolver shows children learning from boredom. do you think creativity depends more on deprivation or abundance?”
closing reflection
“if every space—the hut, the garret, the bridge—mirrors some inner terrain, where are you living right now? what kind of structure would your mind build today?”
The hermit’s hut is a theme which needs no variations
--The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
The hut immediately becomes centralized solitude, for in the land of legend, there exists no adjoining hut.
--The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
The hermit is alone before God. His hut, therefore, is just the opposite of the monastery. And there radiates about this centralized solitude a universe of meditation and prayer, a universe outside the universe. The hut can receive none of the riches “of this world.”
--The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
Occasionally the wind blows a tile from a roof and kills a passer-by in the street. But this roof crime is only aimed at the belated passer-by. Or lightning may for an instant set fire to the window-panes. The house does not tremble, however, when thunder rolls. It trembles neither with nor through us. In our houses set close one up against the other, we are less afraid.
--The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
A hurricane in Paris has not the same personal offensiveness towards the dreamer that it has towards the hermit’s house.
--The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
In Paris there are no houses, and the inhabitants of the big city live in superimposed boxes. “One’s Paris room, inside its four walls,” wrote Paul Claudel, “is a sort of geometrical site, a conventional hole, which we furnish with pictures, objects and wardrobes within a wardrobe.”
--The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
For here the reader is still something of a child, a child who is entertained by reading. But every good book should be re-read as soon as it is finished. After the sketchiness of the first reading comes the creative work of reading. We must then know the problem that confronted the author. The second, then the third reading . . . give us, little by little, the solution of this problem.
--The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
Verticality is ensured by the polarity of cellar and attic, the marks of which are so deep that, in a way, they open up two very different perspectives for a phenomenology of the imagination. Indeed, it is possible, almost without commentary, to oppose the rationality of the roof to the irrationality of the cellar.
--The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
A roof tells its raison d’être right away: it gives mankind shelter from the rain and sun he fears. Geographers are constantly reminding us that, in every country, the slope of the roofs is one of the surest indications of the climate. We “understand” the slant of a roof. Even a dreamer dreams rationally; for him, a pointed roof averts rain clouds.
--The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
As for the cellar, we shall no doubt find uses for it. It will be rationalized and its conveniences enumerated. But it is first and foremost the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces. When we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths.
--The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
“Here the conscious acts like a man who, hearing a suspicious noise in the cellar, hurries to the attic and, finding no burglars there decides, consequently, that the noise was pure imagination. In reality, this prudent man did not dare venture into the cellar.”
--The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
Instead of facing the cellar (the unconscious), Jung’s “prudent man” seeks alibis for his courage in the attic. In the attic rats and mice can make considerable noise. But let the master of the house arrive unexpectedly and they return to the silence of their holes. The creatures moving about in the cellar are slower, less scampering, more mysterious. In the attic, fears are easily “rationalized.
--The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
In the attic, the day’s experiences can always efface the fears of night. In the cellar, darkness prevails both day and night, and even when we are carrying a lighted candle, we see shadows dancing on the dark walls.
--The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
It is a good thing, it is even salutary, for a child to have periods of boredom, for him to learn to know the dialectics of exaggerated play and causeless, pure boredom.
--The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
But how well it exemplifies absolute boredom, the boredom that is not the equivalent of the absence of playmates. There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret.
--The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
And the younger girls—if they are too young to be married and too old to be strapped on someone’s back (which is not a wide margin)—why, they come striding along swinging their woven bags over their shoulders and scowl at you, as if to say, Out of my road, can’t you see I’m busy! They may only be little girls tagging after their mothers, but believe you me, with them it’s all business.
--The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
He was hardly a father except in the vocational sense, as a potter with clay to be molded. Their individual laughter he couldn’t recognize, nor their anguish. He never saw how Adah chose her own exile; how Rachel was dying for the normal life of slumber parties and record albums she was missing. And poor Leah. Leah followed him like an underpaid waitress hoping for the tip.
--The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
Kikongo is a language that is not exactly spoken but sung. The same word slanted up or down the scale can have many different meanings. When Mama Tataba incanted this hymn to all of us, under her breath, she was not calling us fufu eaters or fufu shunners or anything I could have guessed. Fufu nsala is a forest-dwelling, red-headed rat that runs from sunlight.
--The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
This being the case, if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
--The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
Nothing is alien to the Bachelardian home, be it elemental, human or sacred. His imagination is endlessly hospitable.
--The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
Fufu was simply another word for food. Any other thing a person might eat—a banana, an egg, the bean called mangwansi, a piece of fire-blackened antelope flesh—was just the opposite, and its consumption was seen as a remarkable, possibly uncalled-for occasion. My family required remarkable occasions three times a day.
--The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
The house gave the appearance of having been decorated once in a particular style and then never updated again. Between the dark reds on the walls and the glittering stone trees, it felt warm and cold at the same time.
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
As part of my writer’s education, being a cater-waiter allowed me access to the interiors of people’s lives in a way that was different from every other relationship I might have had. When you’re a waiter, clients usually treat you like human furniture. The result is that you see them in unguarded moments
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
Or the Christmas party where the host took a friend into the coatroom to beat him in private (so badly he had to leave), to punish him for being a jerk to us, the waiters. Afterward the host handed out his friend’s cigars to us and said, “My friend said to say he was sorry.”
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
The best thing I’d done for myself as a waiter was to have the cheap polyester tux we all had to wear tailored shortly after starting.
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
She wore a painterly face of makeup that at times resembled the portrait of her that hung in their home.
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
the elevated promenade, because its principal use will be to allow people of leisure, and old and young invalids, to promenade over the bridge on fine days, in order to enjoy the beautiful views and the pure air.” There was no bridge in the world with anything like it. And he added, “I need not state that in a crowded commercial city, such a promenade will be of incalculable value
--The Great Bridge - David McCullough
The long river span was not to be perfectly horizontal, but would bow gracefully, gently upward. It would pass through the tower arches at an elevation of 119 feet, but at the center it would be 130 feet over the water.
--The Great Bridge - David McCullough
But because of the great elevation of the river span and the relatively low-lying shores, the rest of the bridge, sloping down to ground level, would have to extend quite far inland on both sides to provide an easy grade. The bridge would have to descend back to earth rather gradually, as it were, and thus the better part of it would be over land, not water.
--The Great Bridge - David McCullough
In all, from one end to the other, the Great Bridge was to measure 5,862 feet, or more than a mile.
--The Great Bridge - David McCullough
the four immense cables, two outer ones and two near the middle of the bridge floor. These cables would be as much as fifteen inches in diameter and each would hang over the river in what is known as a catenary curve, that perfect natural form taken by any rope or cable suspended from two points, which in this case were the summits of the two stone towers.
--The Great Bridge - David McCullough
Their most distinguishing features would be twin Gothic arches—two in each tower—through which the roadways were to pass. These arches would rise more than a hundred feet, like majestic cathedral windows, or the portals of triumphal gateways.
--The Great Bridge - David McCullough
“In a work of such magnitude, and located as it is between two great cities, good architectural proportions should be observed,” wrote the engineer. “. . . The impression of the whole will be that of massiveness and strength.” His towers would dwarf everything else in view. They would reign over the landscape like St. Peter’s in Rome or the Capitol dome in Washington, as one newspaper said.
--The Great Bridge - David McCullough
Its most conspicuous features, the great towers, will serve as landmarks to the adjoining cities, and they will be entitled to be ranked as national monuments. As a great work of art, and as a successful specimen of advanced bridge engineering, this structure will forever testify to the energy, enterprise and wealth of that community which shall secure its erection.
--The Great Bridge - David McCullough
New York, that “human hive” John Roebling called it, was running out of space, its boundaries being forever fixed by nature. Roebling and others envisioned a day when all Manhattan Island would be built over, leaving “no decent place” to make a home, neither he nor anyone else thus far having imagined a city growing vertically. “Brooklyn happens to be one of those things that can expand,”
--The Great Bridge - David McCullough
A bridge over the East River, joining the cities of New York and Brooklyn, had been talked about for nearly as long as anyone could recall.
--The Great Bridge - David McCullough
The white shirt, black bow tie, and apron came to feel like a cocoon for the novel, or the writer, or both. I wrote that novel on the subway, going back and forth to the restaurant, and sometimes I wrote it while at work—I still have a guest check with an outline that came to me while I waited for my section to be seated.
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
I know some people condescend to me when I mention that I was once a waiter, but I will never regret it. Waiting tables was not just a good living, but also a good education in people. I saw things I never would have imagined, an education in life out past the limits of my own social class. Your imagination needs to be broken in, I think, to become anywhere near as weird as the world.
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
I now think of an MFA as taking twenty years of wondering whether or not your work can reach people and spending two years finding out. It is not an escape from the real world, to my mind, but a confrontation with it
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
The man and I broke up finally in 1994, the year I finished at Iowa. He’d applied to the Workshop again during our first year apart, and when he was rejected a second time, it ate at him, and he resented me. When he canceled our plans to spend the summer together, saying, “You’re going to be the famous one, the one everyone remembers,”
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
I think disappointment, and the desire to revenge oneself on that disappointment, can be an enormous motivator. Being rejected from an MFA program can push you as much as getting in can.
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
“You meet people in your family you’d never run into otherwise.” It’s true of families, and true of workshops also: you meet people there you’d never otherwise meet, much less show your work to, and you listen to them talk about your story or your novel. These are not your ideal readers per se, but they are ideal in that you can never choose your readers in life
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
Fiction writers’ work is limited by their sense of reality, and workshop after workshop blew that open for me, through the way these conversations exposed me to other people’s realities.
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
