A Room
By JACQUETTA HAWICES HABITUALLY I think of myself as a person happiest out of doors in country with some wildness in it. Yet I know I should be miserably at a loss without my room : that is to say without the room where I work and where—it follows—I have assembled my favourite belongings. What perfect contentment can come to a woman closed within four walls in the company of her "things," the select accumulation, probably, of half her lifetime !
The four walls are themselves important. I am one of those who find it hard to work in a large room with many doors and windows, or in one of those modern rooms with open vistas cunningly designed to save the occupant from any feeling of confinement. Such places may be very agreeable. but I would far rather work in an Irish cabin. This may be a proof of psychological weakness, a longing for cloistral security, but it does not imply any wish to be entirely isolated. Far from it. My ideal situation is rather to be compared with that of a sea-urchin living securely inside his shell, but sending out feelers to guide into a voracious mouth food borne along on the currents of the outer world.
When I am in good shape, most (as one likes to think) myself, my consciousness has a sharp appetite for direct experience, and this is given its sharpest edge when I can sit in my room allowing the feelers of my senses, imagination and such thought as I can command to float out around me on a tide of idleness.
It is, first of all, a delight to be aware of other people present in the house with me, like unseen fellow-passengers in a ship. With a partition between us, I know the different selves of the members of the household with a nearness and clarity impossible in their disturbing presence. r am conscious of each one of them below the roof with me, each whole and perfect as a bird's egg on cotton wool, and yet also one with myself.
Then there is the abundance of the out-of-door world beyond my windows. Seen framed and glassed, the landscape at once acquires some of the force of a work of art. I am no longer a part of it in the flux of every day, but viewing it at one remove, when everything near or far, large or small, animal vegetable or mineral, holds an inner significance. Sometimes, when in the mood, I feel I am looking out into a world of Platonic ideas, where the trees and woods represent all that is arboreal and the cows essential cow.
I am fortunate in the prospect from my room. Near at hand is a pond where linnets, pigeons and turtle doves come to drink. There is also a red squirrel that skips across the lawn, plunges its sharp, deft front paws down into the water and drinks, all but standing on its head, As fleecy tail, lighter than the warm red body and exactly matching the ripe cornfields behind, ruffling softly in the wind. In the middle distance the gulls stride against the wind, and rooks and jackdaws are whirled . like bonfire ashes. So I am reminded of the teeming life of the planet in which the life of man has its place, its all-important and yet in no way lonely place. As for human life itself, it could not be better represented than by the ordinary farms lying down there among their fields, nodal points in the pattern of the harvest. On the horizon the sea insists on the reality of greater distances, leading me from my room outward and outward. Aware of the world outside, I can better savour what is in the room with me : my books, pictures, furniture, ornaments and oddments. Much of the flavour comes from their own ' virtue, from the beauty, particularity or interest that led me to acquire them, but salt is added, I confess it, by the fact of possession. I suppose there is something very feminine in this love of objects possessed. I look gloatingly at the dish bought in a remote, crowded market in Mexico, at lustre jugs from a dark shop in Shepherd's Market. There is the Japanese netsuke, a smooth ivory toadstool, which I fingered in my pocket for comfort when flying the tedious wastes of the Pacific; the Mycenean bead; all the pictures I haven't been able to resist buying; the bookcase from my family home. There is the patchwork quilt pieced from the gowns and furbelows of long- dead ladies. How many ages and lands have paid their tribute!
It is delightful, this idle business of sitting in one's room. Sometimes, but rarely, very rarely, there come moments of experience far beyond delight; moments illumined by a kind of ecstasy. This is a lofty, clamant word to use, and yet I write it with confidence. These moments with their taste of revelation are impersonal, and sufficiently precise for me to be able to recognise two distinct forms. In one the stream of experience appears to flow out from my room; in the other it pours into it. The first comes only when I have been working late in a room now become a lighted cave in the darkness of night-time and sleep. Walls and the sheltering roof seem to unfold, and the glow of the room to catch me up together with all the sleeping household and to flow away towards the heavens; a glow that addresses, and is answered by, the stars. I can best describe the second, incoming, experience as the creation of intense sensuous appreciation mingling and dancing with a sense of living history. Thus it is compounded of red- hot immediacy and the infinite past, and yet its effect is to destroy time and open a door, dreamlike, towards eternity. There streams in from outside a vision of the work of nature and of man growing in time to form this present moment; the abounding variety of the landscape and its creatures are them- selves to the last sparkling detail, and yet simultaneously the entirety of their long histories; they are like plants seen growing from roots in the depths of time. While this influx reaches my consciousness from the outer world, within my four walls there shines a wordless revelation of the men and women whose hands have carved, woven, sewed, painted and tended the furnishings, and of the ages and civilisa- tions in which they were made. I am even forced into an awareness of the minerals dug from the earth, the juices and fibres of plants, the spinnings of insects, the animal pelts and tree trunks that have contributed to their substance. Over- whelming all the rest, there floods out from the rows of my books a clamorous intimation of the genius of centuries. Although in these flying moments I cannot, surely, focus and distinguish between the qualities of the great poets and writers whose life-work is folded there behind the coloured backs of their books, yet I believe that somewhere in the subtle intrica- cies of the brain, nerves are struck and set tingling with messages of their individual genius. I sit consumed with happiness, my room drawing into itself the blinding glory of all creation. Afterwards one is tired, of course; even sad and dispirited. Yet while trying to recapture what has vanished, trying to express it with those precious but inadequate symbols, the words of the English language, it is impossible altogether to deny the privilege of being alive and a human being. A human being in possession of a room.
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