to honour a house
and on what makes a home
this week’s Thought (singular)
all i do is drink water and say ‘i need to buy bananas’ at regular intervals. at the time of writing this, i have not yet bought bananas
a very warm welcome to all new readers. i love new readers so much that whenever i get an email about a new reader, i manifest that they step on a very crunchy leaf. thank you for joining us. may you feel the brittle cracking under your foot and let it fill you with a childlike satisfaction.
a very warm welcome to old readers as well. may good sense continue to prevail.
Before We Begin
happy 100th thodi!
i’ve been finding myself stumbling over my words every time i’ve had to explain what this newsletter is about to all the new people i’ve been meeting recently. i’m slowly realising that writing earnestly and regularly about friendship and creativity and growing up is a very corny thing to do. this is not about to stop me. (i had a brief middle-schooler moment this week, where in reply to somebody’s question about the subject matter of this blog, i replied with ‘friends :D’.)
corny they may be, but the last 100 issues have been a blast to write, and i adore the community that we’ve got growing here.
a very badly lit (but friendly) cat to celebrate -
i came across this article earlier this week that perfectly echoed my sentiments about current AI advancements/debates. although is where these links traditionally go, i wanted to share this one here as well. happy reading!
As the ideology behind this bait-and-switch leaks into the wider culture, it slowly corrodes our own self-understanding. If you try to point out, in a large lecture or online forum on AI, that ChatGPT does not experience and cannot think about the things that correspond to the words and sentences it produces — that it is only a mathematical generator of expected language patterns — chances are that someone will respond, in a completely serious manner: “But so are we.”
According to this view, characterizations of human beings as acting wisely, playfully, inventively, insightfully, meditatively, courageously, compassionately or justly are no more than poetic license. According to this view, such humanistic descriptions of our most valued performances convey no added truth of their own. They point to no richer realities of what human intelligence is. They correspond to nothing real beyond the opaque, mechanical calculation of word frequencies and associations. They are merely florid, imprecise words for that same barren task.
hi
it’s been a while since i’ve had to give a this-one-is-all-over-the-place disclaimer, but i regret to inform you that this one is, in fact, all over the place. there’s the consideration of physical place, the connection between home and solitude, and the loveliness of solitude itself. they are all somewhat connected. onward!
i’ve been thinking about home/houses lately. if you’ve been here a while, you know that that’s a very normal thing for me to do. that’s just a regular weekday evening activity. if you’re new, check out these posts for more context -
on the delight and comfort of houses (this one is practically ancient) –
on the way home can be used as a measurement for growth –
on the variety in the concept of home itself as people, places, things, feelings –
on how to make visits home last longer (a personal favourite) –
on home-sickness and home-recovery, or, musings on my time away from and back at home –
when i left my house a couple of weeks ago for college, i was effectively parting ways with it for good, since my family would have relocated to a different house before i visit next. while i was in the process of packing, i remember thinking about the last 14 years i had spent in that building, and considering a very grand-sounding question – how do i honour this house?
i don’t have an answer. how do you honour a physical place, in all of its expanse and construction?
since i left, the concept of physical space has been one that i’ve had to revisit often. my focus has been repeatedly and violently jerked towards spaces. attention towards the physical boundaries of my hostel room, the wooden plane of the table-top, the metal frame of my cot. attention towards the concave perimeter of the classroom, the straight shelves under the benches.
the raw physicality of a house is something that i’ve been curiously inattentive towards, despite all my soliloquizing about home in this newsletter. all of these materials and shapes only started to seem significant to me once i realised that i’d be living in new ones when i went back home. that the walls of my room back home that’ve seeped into my consciousness with every night of sleep won’t surround me again. that i won’t get back those quiet afternoons spent alone with the curtains and doors closed just so, making me feel like i’m the only person in the world for a few hours.
that leads me to the linkage between physical space and solitude that i’ve also found myself increasingly thinking about these days. similar to how it takes work to make a house feel like a home, it takes work to cultivate a physical space where you can enjoy solitude. the importance of a place where no one can reach you. with common washrooms, common dining halls, classes through the day, walking around in groups at night – the time for being alone has felt scarce. i did not realise how much i needed this time until i could begin to feel myself scatter. and my room was too new, too unfamiliar for me to receive the grounding and recentring that solitude and quiet usually bring me. hence, the work.
is that what makes a house a home? a place worthy of solitude, a place that energises you after you spend some time alone enclosed within its walls? does honouring a house-turned-home mean being alone with the walls, the fading paint, the creaking doors, and feeling yourself seep into the foundation of the thing?
i counted my steps to the floor washroom one night, left foot in front of the right as the slap-slap-slap of my flip-flops echoed down the empty corridor and made me aware of the high ceiling, the numerous doors surrounding me. a complete lack of any real isolation – i was vaguely and uncomfortably aware of the sleeping people behind each of those doors – but still, it was a curiously healing quiet.
i’ll leave you with these words from a Mary Oliver interview, where she speaks about the ‘physicality of the world’
What led you to your bond with the natural world? I'm assuming it began when you were very young.
Well, yes, I think it does or does not happen when one is young. ... I grew up in a small town in Ohio. ... It was pastoral, it was nice, it was an extended family. I don't know why I felt such affinity with the natural world except that it was available to me, that's the first thing. It was right there. And for whatever reasons, I felt those first important connections, those first experiences being made with the natural world rather than with the social world. I think the first way you do it, the first way you take meaning from the physicality of the world, from your environment, probably never leaves you. I think it sets a pattern, in a way.
read the full interview here.
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this week’s Song
Don’t Kill Yourself, You’ll Die Anyway by sailor鄧mel
find all shared songs here.
thank you for reading, and see you next week <3