On Culture and Architecture
An odd thing happened to me the other day. I was talking to someone and I used an expression that I had never used before, but was something that Shirley might have a said. Even as I spoke I recognized her voice and for a weird split-second I felt like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Not necessarily a bad thing, I thought to myself.
Sometimes I imagine that Shirley comes home. At least to visit. She looks around our loft, in which little has changed in nine months. “That’s new,” she says, pointing to a framed photograph in the bookcase. It is of her, sitting at the table, in front of that same bookcase. I got it to balance the old photograph of her, taken in the sixties, before we met; glamorous with long hair and large sunglasses. “Why are all my glasses still here?” she asks pointing to a half dozen cases—Robert Marc, Iyoko-Inyaké, Ray-Ban. I sense disapproval in her voice. We go upstairs to the bedroom.
It is a curious thing, this new solitude of mine. More than one person has told me “You will always have the memories of your life together.” Well, I suppose that’s true, but life exists in the present, not the past, and it is in my daily routines that Shirley is most present. After almost five decades, many of my habits are entwined with hers: how I cook, or shop, or simply look at the world. There is a downside: many of the things we did together—eating out, traveling, going to a museum or a concert, watching Jeopardy—have lost their appeal.
In this difficult time the famous Leon Trotsky quote comes to mind: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a German writer of the turn of the nineteenth century; today we would call him a sci-fi author. In 1914 he wrote a novel with the unwieldily title The Grey Cloth and Ten Percent of White. The protagonist is an architect, more specifically a “glass architect,” and Scheerbart dedicated the book to Bruno Taut, a Berlin architect who promoted the idea of revolutionary all-glass buildings. Glasarchitektur (the title of another Scheerbart book) was an avant-garde obsession; Taut imagined “glowing crystal houses and floating, ever-changing glass ornaments.” When I look out my window I can see his crystal city come to life.
Shortly after my wife died, a friend emailed me a quote from Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life, which deals in part with the death of his wife of twenty-nine years. “This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand,” Barnes wrote, “the fact that someone has died may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.” It struck me as an intellectual conceit rather than a real insight. But I ordered the book from Abebooks. It was well written,
Years ago, when Shirley and I lived in Quebec, we regularly took a few days off during the winter to stay at a country inn in the Laurentians, north of Montreal. It was run by a German family, and the hearty food—schnitzel and kartoffelklöße—was a big part of the attraction. So was the cross-country skiing. We could ski out of the front door of our house in Hemmingford, but it was quite flat so hilly terrain was more fun. The trails were long and the area was quite wild. One day we went out, and after several hours I had to admit that we were quite lost.
Home: A Celebration, just published by Rizzoli, is a beautiful book in a good cause; it’s a fundraiser for No Kid Hungry. The interior decorator Charlotte Moss has brought together essays, poems, sketches, and photographs by a variety of authors, including Joyce Carol Oates, Isaac Mizrahi, Annie Leibovitz, Julian Fellowes, Bette Midler, John Grisham, and Alice Waters. There are a few architects, too: Marc Appleton, Michael Imber, Tom Kligerman. And yours truly.