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Currently at Toronto Pearson: 3. High today: 8. Finally an April-showery day. Before it started raining, a sparrow was taking a dust bath in my newly-dug garden.
This place was more of a shotgun shack when we bought it, although I don't think you could've quite angled your buckshot out the back door from the front door. But L.'s father walled up the door in the back of the kitchen, so now you'd just hit our large whiteboard.
We've been here closing in on a year now--the place has been ours for more than a year, since last April Fool's Day. I asked L. a few days ago whether it feels like home. I'm not sure I know what the question means, though. I lived in the same house for almost the whole first eighteen years of my life, but, in my memory, the cottage felt much more like home when I was a kid--absolutely it was where I always wanted to be--though I was never there more than two weeks at a time. The only part of my childhood house I have any recollected affection for is the gardens, and the trees (which are mostly gone now) ... maybe the fireplace, I guess. I wouldn't feel sad, or anything, if someone tore it down someday. Not that it was a bad place, or that I had a bad childhood there; it was just, as a place, kind of no-place. I wouldn't have thought to say at the time that I was there waiting to be somewhere else--that's certainly what I would've said about every place I've lived since, though, for the eighteen years after that: two university residence rooms; a little box that didn't even have a kitchen sink; half a house in my first year as a grad student; a sunny but cockroachy place above a Chinese buffet in my second year; the basement of a very nice woman about to have a very rough time in life, in my first year at York; the "tree-house" at the top of a fire escape off a Queen W. alley, which quickly turned out to be the place L. and I lived in first, and slowly turned out to be the place we have lived in longest--our arbitrary, uncertain idea in coming here was that we'd be here at least a year longer than we were there; our big, old, worn-woody apartment in Kitchener, where we were supposed to be for two years but ended up spending three because we had no particular place else to go, and which was made unliveable by hooligan neighbours for a few months in the middle (but also made deeply unsettling for a few other months by the baby that would cry and cry and cry and cry; our apartment life has often made both L. and I think of something she read in a text about Buddhism and the suffering that is life, something along the lines of how even if everything is wonderful for you, there is still someone you can hear crying through the wall); and then the superficially decent but essentially horrific last place we lived in for the first three years after we came back to Toronto.
The guy who lives next door--on the side where our roof overlaps the neighbours'--plays electric bass. He spends quite a lot of time practising, alone or with his band, usually in the afternoon, often at night. I'm not sure exactly what they play, since we only hear the bass (mostly) and the drums, but it sounds kind of like bluesy, maybe psychedelic-y, rock. Same droney bass riffs over and over and over. It drills right through his wall and ours, and our house happens to be arranged so that I'm usually up against the wall it drills through. That's the most obvious downside to living here. (It's the very worst when he's practising in the middle of the night and I have to get up in the morning to go teach.) I'd say the third reason on our list of reasons we were desperate to move out of our last place was the music coming through the walls--it didn't have to drill in that place. (But it would be part of the second reason if you just combine issues involving crazy and crazy-making neighbours into one reason. The worst time we had there was when Hose Beast would come in the middle of every night to throw herself, screaming, against the door of the apartment next door, trying to get her man to come home. She once told L. that if she was bothering us we should just call the police. But the only time we ever called the police was when the two guys next door were thumping around and smashing things. Various emergency services came to our building not infrequently. We heard the ambulance come when Yelling Man downstairs was found dead by his girlfriend in the middle of the night; we heard her call them; we heard what she said. One or two tenants later, I called the fire department when I saw smoke billowing out of that apartment, and yanked a fire alarm, and nothing happened. (That turned out to be just a forgotten frying pan. There was at least one actual fire in the building while we were there, too.) I watched as our neighbour across the hall was taken away in handcuffs after telling a co-worker she was going to kill herself. (The guy who lived in that apartment before her moved out after his ceiling caved in. Our ceilings leaked chronically; the (superficially decent but essentially horrific) landlord told us it could be worse, it could be like across the hall.) But all of this wasn't the worst thing about living there.)) The particularly stupid thing about it is that we ruled out living in a semi-detached house because I didn't want to have to worry about sound through the walls.
But, well, that being the most obvious downside, it ain't so bad, and it's so many worlds better than where we were before--not just because we've escaped from the horrible things, but because we have a piano, and a cat, and the gardens (despite my groundhog-anxiety), and the birds, and this wonderful bonging clock. As I said to L., or she said to me, it still mostly feels like this is just the latest place we're camping out in, but we're not desperate to leave. I said when we were thinking about buying a house that I wanted to be someplace we wouldn't be looking to leave (which I guess would be a weaker, and worse, definition of "home" than "the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." (If home is "something you somehow haven't to deserve", well, I'm sure this qualifies.) There's something to be said for what Warren says about home, especially if you add "the place where, when they need you, you have to go there"--but it makes "home" a matter of people rather than place; if your family, or your significant other (and there's that old tragic dilemma concerning the obligations of home), is in a hotel room, or a cockroach-infested dump you can't wait to leave, then that's home.) But it's one thing to not be looking to leave, and another thing to want to stay, maybe another thing again to want to keep coming back, to be deeply connected to a place (and maybe to feel heartbroken if you know you can never go back). It's OK here, pretty good, really, much better than most places, and we are fantastically lucky to be here, and I'm uneasy about the hint of wild ungratefulness in what I'm going to say now. But....
The second-most obvious downside to living here is closely tied to one of the most obvious upsides (by which I don't mean the groundhogs eating my plants, though I might well have meant that--in fact, I would probably call that the very worst thing by far if I thought that the groundhogs were just going to keep eating my plants as long as we're here), or at least the main reason we are where we are: location. We're near the subway and near just about any kind of shopping we'd want to do. The flip-side is that, to afford to be in such a convenient location, we have to be out here on what was the edge of the city not so long ago, which means not only that we're a long time from anything that isn't on the subway (which means that I'm a long time from York, for at least the next couple of years), but, more importantly, it's mostly ugly as sin around here--not so insistently immediately around our house (though you can see that big cinder-block wall in all those pictures), and after all there are the birds and the irises and the starry sky above, but more so very quickly when you set out on foot anywhere you want to go.
There's something I picked up on in Nietzsche last year that I keep coming back to: there is a problem about meaningfulness in life if life is basically unpleasant; misery has to be for something if you're going to put up with it. ("Life" in heaven is meaningless, given the usual sense of meaningfulness as purpose-directedness and given the usual idea of heaven: eternal bliss is not for anything. (Huh, it just occurred to me that Nozick's pleasure-machine argument against crude hedonistic utilitarianism is equally against (a crude conception of) heaven.) But you don't (normally) mind that, it doesn't even (normally) occur to you to mind it, because it's bliss; if you have bliss, what else do you need?) This casts the plain ugliness of our world in a couple of strangely contradictory lights. On one hand, it seems natural to us that "utilitarian" things have no "aesthetic" qualities, and ours is a world of utilitarian things. The contemporary factory or strip mall or water treatment plant or hospital or bus terminal--remember, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a gas station--is plainly ugly because the primary concern in designing it is its efficiency, which normally means cost-effectiveness somehow conceived, as a means to some end, and so little can be expended on the thing itself. (Of course this is not always the case, and my impression is that some things are being designed with more of a view to "aesthetics" than they were twenty or thirty years ago--and my impression is that this may be because it's relatively cheaper to make decent-looking things than it used to be. Laminate flooring (or click-together hardwood) is a pretty good example of this kind of thing. But I'm really not sure about this.) On the other hand, what's odd about this when you think about it is that things were designed with much more care for "aesthetics"--more care was taken for things themselves and how we would engage with them, themselves, rather than with them to achieve some further end--when (and this is most of the history of the West) it was generally believed that the world itself is "utilitarian", that our end as human beings does not lie in this world, that the earth and earthly things, including embodied human lives, are all worth nothing in themselves. (While this seems paradoxical in one way, maybe in another way it doesn't: in God's world, worldly things had great extrinsic worth; in a Godless world, it may not be surprising that that extrinsic worth hasn't shifted in our estimation into things themselves but simply vanished.)
We can put up with ugliness in things--we can not even notice it; we can almost welcome it-- if we find sufficient purpose and worth in our engagement with people (including ourselves). We put up with ugliness, we make our world ugly, we don't expect beauty from things, because we find purpose and worth in our human projects. (This is not to say anything against engagement with people (including ourselves) or against human projects. I happen to have been injected with a large dose of optimism about my own main human project this term (cut with the usual year-end pessimism about being permitted to continue on with it). It's only to say something about the one-sidedness of our concern with them.) But if we don't, then....
This place was more of a shotgun shack when we bought it, although I don't think you could've quite angled your buckshot out the back door from the front door. But L.'s father walled up the door in the back of the kitchen, so now you'd just hit our large whiteboard.
We've been here closing in on a year now--the place has been ours for more than a year, since last April Fool's Day. I asked L. a few days ago whether it feels like home. I'm not sure I know what the question means, though. I lived in the same house for almost the whole first eighteen years of my life, but, in my memory, the cottage felt much more like home when I was a kid--absolutely it was where I always wanted to be--though I was never there more than two weeks at a time. The only part of my childhood house I have any recollected affection for is the gardens, and the trees (which are mostly gone now) ... maybe the fireplace, I guess. I wouldn't feel sad, or anything, if someone tore it down someday. Not that it was a bad place, or that I had a bad childhood there; it was just, as a place, kind of no-place. I wouldn't have thought to say at the time that I was there waiting to be somewhere else--that's certainly what I would've said about every place I've lived since, though, for the eighteen years after that: two university residence rooms; a little box that didn't even have a kitchen sink; half a house in my first year as a grad student; a sunny but cockroachy place above a Chinese buffet in my second year; the basement of a very nice woman about to have a very rough time in life, in my first year at York; the "tree-house" at the top of a fire escape off a Queen W. alley, which quickly turned out to be the place L. and I lived in first, and slowly turned out to be the place we have lived in longest--our arbitrary, uncertain idea in coming here was that we'd be here at least a year longer than we were there; our big, old, worn-woody apartment in Kitchener, where we were supposed to be for two years but ended up spending three because we had no particular place else to go, and which was made unliveable by hooligan neighbours for a few months in the middle (but also made deeply unsettling for a few other months by the baby that would cry and cry and cry and cry; our apartment life has often made both L. and I think of something she read in a text about Buddhism and the suffering that is life, something along the lines of how even if everything is wonderful for you, there is still someone you can hear crying through the wall); and then the superficially decent but essentially horrific last place we lived in for the first three years after we came back to Toronto.
The guy who lives next door--on the side where our roof overlaps the neighbours'--plays electric bass. He spends quite a lot of time practising, alone or with his band, usually in the afternoon, often at night. I'm not sure exactly what they play, since we only hear the bass (mostly) and the drums, but it sounds kind of like bluesy, maybe psychedelic-y, rock. Same droney bass riffs over and over and over. It drills right through his wall and ours, and our house happens to be arranged so that I'm usually up against the wall it drills through. That's the most obvious downside to living here. (It's the very worst when he's practising in the middle of the night and I have to get up in the morning to go teach.) I'd say the third reason on our list of reasons we were desperate to move out of our last place was the music coming through the walls--it didn't have to drill in that place. (But it would be part of the second reason if you just combine issues involving crazy and crazy-making neighbours into one reason. The worst time we had there was when Hose Beast would come in the middle of every night to throw herself, screaming, against the door of the apartment next door, trying to get her man to come home. She once told L. that if she was bothering us we should just call the police. But the only time we ever called the police was when the two guys next door were thumping around and smashing things. Various emergency services came to our building not infrequently. We heard the ambulance come when Yelling Man downstairs was found dead by his girlfriend in the middle of the night; we heard her call them; we heard what she said. One or two tenants later, I called the fire department when I saw smoke billowing out of that apartment, and yanked a fire alarm, and nothing happened. (That turned out to be just a forgotten frying pan. There was at least one actual fire in the building while we were there, too.) I watched as our neighbour across the hall was taken away in handcuffs after telling a co-worker she was going to kill herself. (The guy who lived in that apartment before her moved out after his ceiling caved in. Our ceilings leaked chronically; the (superficially decent but essentially horrific) landlord told us it could be worse, it could be like across the hall.) But all of this wasn't the worst thing about living there.)) The particularly stupid thing about it is that we ruled out living in a semi-detached house because I didn't want to have to worry about sound through the walls.
But, well, that being the most obvious downside, it ain't so bad, and it's so many worlds better than where we were before--not just because we've escaped from the horrible things, but because we have a piano, and a cat, and the gardens (despite my groundhog-anxiety), and the birds, and this wonderful bonging clock. As I said to L., or she said to me, it still mostly feels like this is just the latest place we're camping out in, but we're not desperate to leave. I said when we were thinking about buying a house that I wanted to be someplace we wouldn't be looking to leave (which I guess would be a weaker, and worse, definition of "home" than "the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." (If home is "something you somehow haven't to deserve", well, I'm sure this qualifies.) There's something to be said for what Warren says about home, especially if you add "the place where, when they need you, you have to go there"--but it makes "home" a matter of people rather than place; if your family, or your significant other (and there's that old tragic dilemma concerning the obligations of home), is in a hotel room, or a cockroach-infested dump you can't wait to leave, then that's home.) But it's one thing to not be looking to leave, and another thing to want to stay, maybe another thing again to want to keep coming back, to be deeply connected to a place (and maybe to feel heartbroken if you know you can never go back). It's OK here, pretty good, really, much better than most places, and we are fantastically lucky to be here, and I'm uneasy about the hint of wild ungratefulness in what I'm going to say now. But....
The second-most obvious downside to living here is closely tied to one of the most obvious upsides (by which I don't mean the groundhogs eating my plants, though I might well have meant that--in fact, I would probably call that the very worst thing by far if I thought that the groundhogs were just going to keep eating my plants as long as we're here), or at least the main reason we are where we are: location. We're near the subway and near just about any kind of shopping we'd want to do. The flip-side is that, to afford to be in such a convenient location, we have to be out here on what was the edge of the city not so long ago, which means not only that we're a long time from anything that isn't on the subway (which means that I'm a long time from York, for at least the next couple of years), but, more importantly, it's mostly ugly as sin around here--not so insistently immediately around our house (though you can see that big cinder-block wall in all those pictures), and after all there are the birds and the irises and the starry sky above, but more so very quickly when you set out on foot anywhere you want to go.
There's something I picked up on in Nietzsche last year that I keep coming back to: there is a problem about meaningfulness in life if life is basically unpleasant; misery has to be for something if you're going to put up with it. ("Life" in heaven is meaningless, given the usual sense of meaningfulness as purpose-directedness and given the usual idea of heaven: eternal bliss is not for anything. (Huh, it just occurred to me that Nozick's pleasure-machine argument against crude hedonistic utilitarianism is equally against (a crude conception of) heaven.) But you don't (normally) mind that, it doesn't even (normally) occur to you to mind it, because it's bliss; if you have bliss, what else do you need?) This casts the plain ugliness of our world in a couple of strangely contradictory lights. On one hand, it seems natural to us that "utilitarian" things have no "aesthetic" qualities, and ours is a world of utilitarian things. The contemporary factory or strip mall or water treatment plant or hospital or bus terminal--remember, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a gas station--is plainly ugly because the primary concern in designing it is its efficiency, which normally means cost-effectiveness somehow conceived, as a means to some end, and so little can be expended on the thing itself. (Of course this is not always the case, and my impression is that some things are being designed with more of a view to "aesthetics" than they were twenty or thirty years ago--and my impression is that this may be because it's relatively cheaper to make decent-looking things than it used to be. Laminate flooring (or click-together hardwood) is a pretty good example of this kind of thing. But I'm really not sure about this.) On the other hand, what's odd about this when you think about it is that things were designed with much more care for "aesthetics"--more care was taken for things themselves and how we would engage with them, themselves, rather than with them to achieve some further end--when (and this is most of the history of the West) it was generally believed that the world itself is "utilitarian", that our end as human beings does not lie in this world, that the earth and earthly things, including embodied human lives, are all worth nothing in themselves. (While this seems paradoxical in one way, maybe in another way it doesn't: in God's world, worldly things had great extrinsic worth; in a Godless world, it may not be surprising that that extrinsic worth hasn't shifted in our estimation into things themselves but simply vanished.)
We can put up with ugliness in things--we can not even notice it; we can almost welcome it-- if we find sufficient purpose and worth in our engagement with people (including ourselves). We put up with ugliness, we make our world ugly, we don't expect beauty from things, because we find purpose and worth in our human projects. (This is not to say anything against engagement with people (including ourselves) or against human projects. I happen to have been injected with a large dose of optimism about my own main human project this term (cut with the usual year-end pessimism about being permitted to continue on with it). It's only to say something about the one-sidedness of our concern with them.) But if we don't, then....
