A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams - Softcover

Pollan, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143114743 ISBN 13: 9780143114741

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2008

Synopsis

“A glorious piece of prose . . . Pollan leads readers on his adventure with humor and grace.” —Chicago Tribune

A captivating personal inquiry into the art of architecture, the craft of building, and the meaning of modern work

“A room of one’s own: Is there anybody who hasn’t at one time or another wished for such a place, hasn’t turned those soft words over until they’d assumed a habitable shape?”

When Michael Pollan decided to plant a garden, the result was the acclaimed bestseller Second Nature. In A Place of My Own, he turns his sharp insight to the craft of building, as he recounts the process of designing and constructing a small one-room structure on his rural Connecticut property—a place in which he hoped to read, write, and daydream, built with his own two unhandy hands.

Michael Pollan's unmatched ability to draw lines of connection between our everyday experiences—whether eating, gardening, or building—and the natural world has been the basis for the popular success of his many works of nonfiction, including the genre-defining bestsellers The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. With this updated edition of his earlier book A Place of My Own, readers can revisit the inspired, intelligent, and often hilarious story of Pollan's realization of a room of his own—a small, wooden hut, his "shelter for daydreams"—built with his admittedly unhandy hands. Inspired by both Thoreau and Mr. Blandings, A Place of My Own not only works to convey the history and meaning of all human building, it also marks the connections between our bodies, our minds, and the natural world.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Pollan is the author of seven previous books, including Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. He's also the author of the audiobook Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World. A longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine, he also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, TIME magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.

From the Back Cover

"A room of one's own: is there anybody who hasn't at one time or another wished for such a place, hasn't turned those soft words over until they'd assumed a habitable shape?"
When writer Michael Pollan decided to plant a garden, the result was an award-winning treatise on the borders between nature and contemporary life, the acclaimed bestseller Second Nature. Now Pollan turns his sharp insight to the craft of building, as he recounts the process of designing and constructing a small one-room structure on his rural Connecticut property--a place in which he hoped to read, write and daydream, built with his two own unhandy hands.
Invoking the titans of architecture, literature and philosophy, from Vitrivius to Thoreau, from the Chinese masters of feng shui to the revolutionary Frank Lloyd Wright, Pollan brilliantly chronicles a realm of blueprints, joints and trusses as he peers into the ephemeral nature of "houseness" itself. From the spark of an idea to the search for a perfect site to the raising of a ridgepole, Pollan revels in the infinitely detailed, complex process of creating a finished structure. At once superbly written, informative and enormously entertaining, A Place of My Own is for anyone who has ever wondered how the walls around us take shape--and how we might shape them ourselves.

A Place of My Own recounts his two-and-a-half-year journey of discovery in an absorbing narrative that deftly weaves the day-to-day work of design and building--from siting to blueprint, from the pouring of foundations to finish carpentry--with reflections on everything form the power of place to shape our lives to the question of what constitutes "real work" in a technologicalsociety.

A book about craft that is itself beautifully crafted, linking the world of the body and material things with the realm of mind, heart, and spirit, "A Place of My Own has received extraordinary praise: -->

"From the Trade Paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER ONE

A room of one's own: Is there anybody who hasn't at one time or another wished for such a place, hasn't turned those soft words over until they'd assumed a habitable shape? What they propose, to anyone who admits them into the space of a day-dream, is a place of solitude a tew steps off the beaten track of everyday life. Beyond that, though, the form the dream takes seems to vary with the dreamer. Generally the imagined room has a fixed terrestrial address, whether located deep within the family house or out in the woods under its own roof. For some people, though, the same dream can just as easily assume a vehicular form. I'm thinking of the one-person cockpit or cabin, a mobile room in which to journey some distance from the shore of one's usual cares. Fixed or mobile, a dream of escape is what this probably sounds like. But it's more like a wish for a slightly different angle on things-for the view from the tower, or tree line, or the bobbing point a couple hundred yards off the coast. It might be a view of the same old life, but from out here it will look different, the outlines of the self a little more distinct.

In my own case, there came a moment—a few years shy of my fortieth birthday, and on the verge of making several large changes in my life-when the notion of a room of my own, and specifically, of a little wood-frame hut in the woods behind my house, began to occupy my imaginings with a mounting insistence. This in itself didn't surprise me particularly. I was in the process of pulling my life up by the roots, all at once becoming a father, leaving the city where I'd lived since college, and setting out on an uncertain new career. Indeed, it would have been strange if I hadn't entertained fantasies of escape or, as I preferred to think of it, simplification—of reducing so many daunting new complexities to something as stripped-down and uncomplicated as a hut in the woods. What was surprising, though, and what had no obvious cause or explanation in my life as it had been lived up to then, was a corollary to the dream: I wanted not only a room of my own, but a room of my own making. I wanted to build this place myself.

To know me even slightly is to know how ill-equipped I was to undertake such an enterprise, and how completely out of character it would be. Like my father-who only very briefly owned a toolbox, and who regarded the ethic of the do-it-yourselfer as about as alien as Zen—I am a radically unhandy man for whom the hanging of a picture or the changing of a washer is a fairly big deal.
To Judith, my wife, I am "the Jewish fix-it man" —this being a contradiction in terms, a creature no more plausible than a unicorn. Apart from eating, gardening, short-haul driving, and sex, I generally preferred to delegate my commerce with the physical world to specialists; things seemed to work out better that way. Unnecessary physical tests hold no romance for me, and I am not ordinarily given to Thoreauvian fantasies of self-sufficiency or worries about the fate of manhood in the modern world. I'm a writer and editor by trade, more at home in the country of words than things.

At home, perhaps, yet not entirely content, and in this dim restlessness may lie a clue to the unexpected emergence of my do-it-yourself self. For if the wish for a room of my own answered to a need I felt for a literal and psychic space, the wish to build it with my own hands, though slower to surface, may have reflected some doubts I was having about the sort of work I do. Work is how we situate ourselves in the world, and like the work of many people nowadays, mine put me in a relationship to the world that often seemed abstract, glancing, secondhand. Or thirdhand, in my case, for I spent much of my day working on other peoples' words, rewriting, revising, rewording. Oh, it was real work (I guess), but it didn't always feel that way, possibly because there were whole parts of me it failed to address. (Like my body, with the exception of the carpal tunnel in my wrist.) Nor did what I do seem to add much, if anything, to the stock of reality, and though this might be a dated or romantic notion in an age of information, it seemed to me this was something real work should do. Whenever I heard myself described as an "information-services worker" or a "symbolic analyst," I wanted to reach for a hammer, or a hoe, and with it make something less virtual than a sentence.

But the do-it-myself part came later; first came the wish for the space-specifically, for a simple, one-room outbuilding where I could write and read outside the house, at least during the summer months. Even after a substantial renovation, our house is tiny, and as Judith's due date approached, it seemed to grow tinier still. As our rooms filled up with the bassinet and booster seat, the crib and high chair and changing table, the walker and stroller and bouncer and monitor, a house that had always seemed a distinct reflection of two individuals living a particular life in a particular place began to feel more like some sort of tranchise, a generic nonplace furnished in white polyethylene and licensed fictional beings. Whatever the virtues of such an environment for raising a child, it was not one where I could easily imagine reading a book without pictures in it through to the end, much less getting one written.

Probably this sounds like nothing more than the panic of a new father, and I don't discount that, but there were other factors at work here too. At roughly the same time, I was preparing to give up my office in the city, where I had a job at a magazine, to begin working out of my house, writing full-time. My office had never been much to look at—it was a standard corporate cube in a "sick building" with toxic air. Even so, it was a space where I enjoyed a certain sovereignty, where I could shut my door and maintain my desk in a state easily mistaken for chaos, and I was giving it up at the very moment that my house was shrinking. As for Judith, she already had a room of her own-the studio where she went each day to paint in perfect solitude. Now even this cluttered and fumy barn became a place I gazed at longingly.

I too needed a place to work. That at least is the answer I had prepared for anybody who asked what exactly I was doing out there in the woods with my hammer and circular saw for what turned out to be two and a half years of Sundays. I was building an office for myself, an enterprise so respectable that the federal government gives you tax deductions for it.

But the official home-office answer, while technically accurate and morally unimpeachable, doesn't tell the whole story of why I wanted a room of my own in the woods, a dream that, in its emotional totality, fits awkwardly onto the lines of a 1040 form, not to mention those of casual conversation. I was glad to have a sensible-sounding explanation I could trot out when necessary, but what I felt the need for was not nearly so rational, and much more difficult to name.

It was right around this time that I stumbled upon a French writer named Gaston Bachelard, a brilliant and sympathetic student of the irrational, who helped me to locate some of the deeper springs of my wish. "If I were asked to name the chief benefits of the house," Bachelard wrote in a beautiful, quirky 1958 book called The Poetics of Space, "I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace." An obvious idea perhaps, but in it I recognized at once what it was I'd lost and dreamt of recovering.

Daydreaming does not enjoy tremendous prestige in our culture, which tends to regard it as unproductive thought. Writers perhaps appreciate its importance better than most, since a fair amount of what they call work consists of little more than daydreaming edited.
Yet anyone who reads for pleasure should prize it too, for what is reading a good book but a daydream at second hand? Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward. For regardless of the result (if any), the very process of daydreaming is plea-surable. And, I would guess, is probably a psychological necessity. For isn't it in our daydreams that we acquire some sense of what we are about? Where we try on futures and practice our voices before committing ourselves to words or deeds? Daydreaming is where we go to cultivate the self, or, more likely, selves, out of the view and earshot of other people. Without its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink down to the size and shape of the estimation of others.

To daydream obviously depends on a certain degree of solitude, but I didn't always appreciate that it might require its own literal and dedicated place. For isn't walking or driving to work or waiting on line for the ATM space enough in which to daydream? Not deeply or freely, according to Bachelard; true reverie needs a physical shelter, though the architectural requirements he sets forth for it are slight. In Bachelard's view the room of one's own need be nothing more than an attic or basement, a comfortable winged chair off in the corner, or even the circle of contemplative space created by a fire in a hearth. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf sets more stringent specifications for the space, probably because she is concerned with one particular subset of daydreamer—the female writer-whose requirements are somewhat greater on account of the demands often made on her by others. "A lock on the door," Woolf writes, "means the power to think for oneself."

Both Woolf and Bachelard are obviously writing as moderns, for the notion of a room of one's own—a place of solitude for the indi-vidual—is historically speaking a fairly recent invention. But then again, so is the self, or at least the self as we've come to think of it, an individual with a rich interior life. Dipping recently into a multi-volume history of private life edited by Philippe Ariès, I was fascinated to learn how the room of one's own (specifically, the private study located off the master bedroom) and the modern sense of the individual emerged at more or less the same moment during the Renaissance. Apparently this is no accident: The new space and the new self actually helped give shape to one another. It appears there is a kind of reciprocity between interiors and interiority.

The room of one's own that Woolf and Bachelard and the French historians all talked about as necessary to the interior lite was located firmly within the confines of a larger house, whether it was an attic nook, a locked room, or a study off the master bedroom. I shared that dream, as far as it went. But none of these images quite squared with my own, which featured not only four walls but also a roof and several windows filled with views of the woods and fields. Not just a room, it was a building of my own I wanted, an outpost of solitude pitched somewhere in the landscape rather than in the house. And so I began to wonder (not one to leave any such thing unexamined) where in the world could that part of the dream have come from? Who, in other words, put a roof on it?

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0143114743
• ISBN 13: 9780143114741
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352