Monday, July 26, 2004
(12:57 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
On Complex Space
Today, while half-assedly working on a paper, I was thinking about space, about apportioning space. Currently, my bookshelves are in the living room, and my computer is on a too-small desk in my bedroom. The surface of this desk is slightly larger than the average elementary school desk. Given the aggressively intertextual nature of my intellectual work, this can be a hinderance. So I thought that it would be good to have a big desk, like a business-sized desk.I thought it would be nice to have a separate room with that big desk in it and with my books in it, perhaps even with an additional table. It would be a "study." I would need to have a whole other computer in there, a clunky desktop model good for nothing else other than word processing. Ideally, of course, it would have a flat-screen monitor, with the keyboard coming out of a little drawer underneath the table surface. Better: a monitor that could hang on the wall, like a picture. I would not use the Internet on that computer. All my books would be right there, and I wouldn't have to clutter my bedroom with my books for classes -- I wouldn't have to wake up every morning to see forty books on top of my dresser during the semester. I could just keep casual reading in my room, the novel on my nightstand, perhaps some magazines. My bedroom could be a room where rest took place.
I'd go on, but this all seems to be simultaneously so blindingly obvious and so impossible -- I can't imagine settling down in one spot for long enough that having separate rooms for separate things (and thus the furniture to populate such rooms) seems like a genuine possibility. The very tranquility I seek in the idealized "study" would be disrupted by the thought that I may very well have to move within the next six months. And if (when) I go on to the PhD, I will effectively render such living arrangements impossible by accepting voluntary poverty for the next five or six years.
Does a peaceful, settled life only seem appealling because it's out of my grasp? I don't think that's quite it. I've been trying to develop a stable schedule since I was ten. It still hasn't worked out.
UPDATE:
Since Adrian suggested in the comments that we lay out our ideal spaces, let me add the following points. I want one of those stupidly big globes, and I want a ratty, comfortable recliner with a little rack next to it for magazines. I want a view -- just any old thing, not necessarily beautiful. I'm perfectly content with looking out the bay window in my living room at my boring neighborhood full of old people, for instance. I just need to be able to see that the outside world exists.
I want to stand at the window, holding a cup of coffee, with my back toward all my knowledge, real or imagined, and all my work. And I want it to be autumn.
