Being creative and productive while staying at home
BACK IN THE DAY, THERE WERE NEW ENGLANDERS WHO WORKED AT HOME BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO.
In this month (and maybe the next) we are all under house arrest. As we itch on the ankle bracelet of our COVID-19 home confinement sentence, it’s good to know that domesticity is not all about binge watching and matching socks.
We may all be going stir crazy, but that may be because we have been conditioned to expect that the world will entertain us, versus fulfilling our lives while living and working at home, in home.
It is pretty easy to forget about life before I-95, or even the Merritt Parkway, or even that living without cars was all people knew before the 20th century. Fast food, big box stores, mani-pedi’s and happy hour exploded into our lives in the last couple of generations. These points of contact have been curtailed, but we humans have not changed.
For some, house arrest was pretty freeing in the 19th century, when cars, Egg McMuffins and Starbucks were not even thought of. Back in the day, there were New Englanders who worked at home because they wanted to. Keeping within their four walls was seen as a great good thing: not a sequestration. Maybe in the COVID-19 cabin fever era, a little perspective can temper our tantrums.
Think about Emily Dickinson. Born in 1830, she went to Mount Holyoke College, but then lived her life, over 30 years, at her family home in Amherst, Mass., dubbed the Homestead and built in 1856. In her room, alone, Dickinson wrote over 1,800 poems. She shared very few of them and met with very few people outside her immediate family. She chose this life, never marrying, let alone having a family.
In one of her poems, Emily wrote: “The Soul selects her own society — Then — shuts the Door.” Her life’s work lived in her room, with her, until she died. Then her sister, Vinnie, discovered in her writings a life so richly considered in stark isolation that it took over half a century to share it with the world. Others in her time wrote to publish (the industrial printing press was the Internet of the era) but Emily found herself, by herself, and now we have her.
Dickinson might have been, well, unusual. Her death was ascribed to kidney failure (Bright’s disease) brought on by “stress.” But others have found liberation in their solitude here in New England.
We may be holed up for a month or three in the confines of the homes we have made for ourselves, but some opted to sentence themselves to solitary. Henry David Thoreau, like Emily Dickinson, was a 19thcentury Massachusetts’s native. Like many in the raging Industrial Revolution of the time, the variety of opportunities that presented themselves, and the intellectual zealotry of abolition, transcendentalism, even anarchism where fully captivating to Thoreau. So he opted out.
He spent two years, two months and two days living alone in a one-room cabin on Walden Pond, in his hometown of Concord, Mass., on a site owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson. He compressed those months into four seasons in his book that was part memoir, part manifesto, “Walden, or, Life in the Woods.”
Well, his mom did his laundry, and the town of the site was really quite civilized — on a train line that went to Boston, but Thoreau saw the virtue in isolation. He self-sequestered not for a common good, but for the extraordinary insights and understandings isolation gave him. Perhaps there is a lesson there.
Finally, in the patriarchy of 17th-century England, Sir Edmund Coke coined the root of the conventional wisdom “A man’s home is his castle.” The American version of that is what has come to be called “The American Dream” of a plot of land, surrounded by a white picket fence, with a place to come home to upon it.
The 21st century version of that has shifted. All humans work, and for couple in a relationship, living under one roof, it is most likely that both work, and that one or both work at home. And now, right now, no one is leaving the confines of this American Dream for a while.
This New American Dream now contains a designated home office, sequestered amid the flow of modern families. But in 1874, Mark Twain hired architect Edward Tuckerman Potter to create a “High Gothic” home in Hartford. It is an exquisite architectural event that by Twain biographer Justin Kaplan called “Part steamboat, part medieval fortress and part cuckoo clock.”
But it has an amazing library. In that place Mark Twain wrote “The Prince and the Pauper,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court” and many others. All of this amazing creation happened in about 15 years. And in one home.
So as you eat dinner in your pajamas, realize that others did not let being housebound deter their vision. On the contrary, once the distractions of our modern era are taken away from us for a time, maybe we are given what Dickinson, Thoreau and Twain knew. Being at home gives anyone the safety, comfort and outlook that no other place can.