The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (25 page)

The other day, a
New York Times
article reported on the objections of the neighbors in Greenwich, Connecticut, to a proposed 39,000-square-foot home with a “3,600-square-foot indoor gym, complete with its own squash court, golf simulator, massage room, beauty parlor and indoor pool, with views of a sunken garden.” Penelope’s home in Ithaca must have been huge too, since she keeps, among other staff, fifty female servants, but old palaces were like the White House, a place where the business of dominating a region, eating big dinners, and procreating the heirs to power were all transacted, and public and private flowed into each other through open doors. Privacy was for peasants. Gymnasium in Greece was a public place, and in Germany it is the high school.

DOUBLE BOLT

The scholar of religion Mircea Eliade was born in Bucharest, studied in India, returned home in 1937 to run for election as a member of the Everything for the Fatherland party that was an extension of Romania’s Iron Guard, was jailed under the king, fled to France when his country fell under communism, and ended up an honored professor at the University of Chicago, where he wrote many books. I went into the hall where most of my bookcases are, looking in my old broken-spined undergraduate paperback copy of his
The Sacred and the Profane
for something about the world pole that seminomadic peoples would set up, a sort of tent pole that symbolically connected heaven and earth and became the center of the world, giving those gathered around it a sense of location, position, place in the world, as home does for each of us. I found instead a passage that announces,

One of the outstanding characteristics of traditional societies is the opposition that they assume between their inhabited territory and the unknown and indeterminate space that surrounds it. The former is the world (more precisely, our world), the cosmos: everything outside it is no longer a cosmos but a sort of “other world,” a foreign, chaotic space, peopled by ghosts, demons, “foreigners” (who are assimilated to demons and the souls of the dead).

This is the old language of anthropology, the discourse on
them
, but it might as well be about us. The “unknown and indeterminate space” is implied to be an old or primitive perception, but it is enormously like the suspicious anxiety of most of the people in my country today. Something very peculiar has taken place during the last quarter century as the social contract has been dismantled and the public arena abandoned; and gone along with it, the sense of existing in a shared realm where your gain and your loss are also mine, where we are tied together in a common fellowship that might be a civilization or a community or a nation. What began as tax revolts a quarter century or so ago dismantled the recently built shelters for the poor, the young, the mad, the damaged, shelters that were economic or social services, were provided as an expression of solidarity and of security,
for if we could provide for anyone to whom the worst had happened then none of us need fear that worst so much as before.

But the great overarching roof of social programs was dismantled, the mad were let go into the streets, and the armies of the homeless, who pushed their shopping carts through the 1980s and the 1990s and continue drifting through the inhospitable asphalt wildernesses of the new millennium, appeared as almost everyone quickly forgot that life had been otherwise not so long ago. In this brutal new world of unmitigated market forces, nothing remained yours but the space that you paid for, a realm shrunken back to the bounds of private property, with phantasmagorical fears chewing at the edges, whether criminals (the nice statistic being that the more you stayed home and watched local TV news, the more you were afraid to leave the house) or immigrants or germs, a host of others to be kept out. This is why each house had to be set up at least imaginatively as completely autonomous, with its home entertainment center replacing the old communal movie houses, with a set of weights in the garage for many and a private gym for a few, for isolation (even though these houses in their reliance on electricity, gas, water, and other services remained in fact a part of a shared network; this withdrawal from the community is an ideology and an imaginary space more than an actuality, except in the case of the few survivalists in the backwoods who aren’t living entirely off canned goods and trucked-in propane). The world, in Eliade’s sense, was no larger than the suburban house lot, a quarter acre of coherence in a sea of savagery and strangeness.

The philosophy behind this retreat from public life was capitalism red in tooth and claw, and it argued like Protestant Christianity that wealth came as a result of virtue, and poverty as a result of vice; that those who suffered, earned it; and indeed the suffering, particularly the legions of the homeless, served as reminders of how a pitiless economy would grind anyone underfoot who faltered. And so, faltering became far more terrifying, and dissent—even dedicating your life to something more altruistic or adventurous than getting and spending—faded a little from everyday life. The argument against the public good was buttressed by private good: Who needed good tap water when it was buyable in bottles? Who needed
public schools when there were private academies? Who needed to undermine the causes of crime and provide public protection for the victims when private security forces were mushrooming so spectacularly, with gates, closed-circuit cameras, handguns, and more? All this was the backdrop to the rising obsession with home ownership and home improvement.

It was as though all that realm of citizenry and public life had shrunk back and no one dared hope for a better society or desired membership in some continental sense of possibility; they just tended lawns or refinished the kitchen cabinets, as though the nation-state in this otherwise globalized age had shrunk to the size of a single-family house, as though everyone was living in a country of one or two or maybe six, including four minors, plus a dog and a cat, a microscopic empire ruled by fiat. Thus the people sleeping under cardboard in doorways and the people having a more expansive master suite built shared a common fate not in material goods but in this atomization, of one against the world. For the non-homeless, this retreat was into a house that was once again a fortress as it had been in various perilous pasts, but this time the world had been made unstable for the sake of tax cuts and more cuts. The old modernist dream of a better world had become the dream of a better home and garden, and a massive industry of television programs, magazines, books, tax deductions, Home Depot warehouses, and more specialized stores fed this appetite or this distraction.

The twenty-first-century American housing boom was globalized anyway, critics argued, because it was fed by artificially low interest rates held down by the Republican administration and backed by massive investment from China, situated as purchases of extremely low-yield or even negative-yield treasury bonds. China did this to keep its own economy from booming into a rising yuan and living standard that would undermine its status as the world’s great discount manufactory; the United States did this to keep its own economy from sliding into recession or even depression. A cheap yuan kept their economy going, as a booming housing market kept the U.S. market going, though going as a house of cards ready to tumble. Which is to say that a withdrawal from public life and national ideals can have consequences in those spheres anyway. “A nation,” says Leopold
Bloom, “is people living in the same place,” a lackluster answer that annoys his nationalist interrogators even before he adds, “or also in different places.” But not necessarily at home in the world. Just in the home.

CLOSING COSTS

Making and controlling a world is much of what child’s play once consisted of, when it consisted of toy soldiers, dolls, blocks, train sets, Noah’s arks, Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets, dollhouses, and other devices that before Gameboys let children be engineers, builders, and designers. The tiny scale lets children be giants, Iron Guards, kings or queens of Ithaca, prime ministers, in charge of their world as they are not in the world. Maybe we all dream of being God, the god who breaches dams, moves houses suddenly, erects bridges, decides where forests will be and who will die; and we graduate from the dollhouse to our own house if we are lucky, where we assume a role somewhere between God the Creator and the chambermaid, choosing but carrying out more painfully the clean floor, the dinner for six, the potted plants, the framed prints. The execution is difficult. The dreaming is easy and unending.

2006

NOTES FROM NOWHERE

Iceland’s Polite Dystopia

In late 2007, an Icelandic teenager named Vífill Atlason created a minor international incident when he phoned the White House, told the operator he was the president of Iceland, and managed to set up an appointment to speak with George W. Bush. When the White House figured out what was going on, Atlason was taken away by Icelandic police and questioned for several hours, then told that he would be placed on an American no-fly list. No conversation took place. I, on the other hand, managed to make a lunch date with President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson not long after I arrived in Iceland, simply by bumping into him at an art exhibit and asking. Iceland is a nation of just over 300,000 citizens, a scale at which everything should be and can be accessible to the ordinary citizen as well as the crashing writer. In fact, I was picked up for my date by Dorrit Moussaieff, the president’s Israeli-born second wife, who happened to be heading off with another American to another lunch. This other American, an extremely wealthy New Yorker in well-ironed jeans, liked Iceland so much that he was thinking about settling here, and as we crossed downtown Reykjavík in the chauffeured presidential Land Cruiser, he listed his reasons: clean air, clean water, no crime, and no immigrants. He liked Iceland, apparently, for being a gated community with the whole North Atlantic as its gates, but he still had his concerns. The graffiti lightly spattered over the city bothered him enough to mention it twice.

And then they went to their lunch, and the chauffeur and I rolled onward to Bessastaðir, the suburban presidential residence. Built as a school in the eighteenth century, Bessastaðir is one of the few old buildings left on this long-deforested island, where for a millennium most structures were made from driftwood and sod. Bessastaðir’s cluster of immaculate red-roofed
white buildings looks like a small country estate, and though it is set apart from the other houses in the neighborhood by a wide grassy lawn, it has no apparent defense against interlopers, not even a serious fence. The president travels without visible security everywhere in Iceland, showing up at art openings and ribbon cuttings to mingle and shake hands when he’s not overseas—as he often is—pitching Iceland to investors, talking up the democratic virtues of small states, and organizing climate-change initiatives. Grímsson had lived at Bessastaðir for three four-year terms, and the question of his fourth was up in the air when I arrived. The president is by no means as powerful as Iceland’s parliament or its prime minister, Geir Haarde. But he does have real authority in some areas, notably the ability to veto legislation, and—more to the point—he is recognized by most as the nation’s symbolic leader, which is why I wanted to talk to him.

Iceland’s population is one thousandth that of the United States, and I wanted to know if the problems we faced at home were a function of size. An encouraging domestic development during the long years of the Bush administration had been the tendency of U.S. cities and states to set their own policies, particularly on the environment and climate change—to withdraw from the unaccountable federation to a more responsive, more localized scale. And so I looked toward Iceland with optimism. I was in a country with no army and little crime, where children are free to run outdoors unsupervised. Most of the people in Iceland are related to one another, and few of them seem to feel that American anxiety of being adrift without an anchor of stable identity or community. Iceland is one of the most literate countries on earth, with the world’s highest per-capita book sales. Not only does it have a long tradition of writer-politicians but, as a returning émigrée explained it to me (though her sense of things might have been a little out of date), “Here the garbageman has read Cicero.” Certain democratic measures are built into the culture: for instance, the way everyone’s surname is just his or her father’s first name with the suffix
-son
or
-dóttir
appended; a wife doesn’t take her husband’s name, and even the most distinguished names are rarely passed from one generation to the next. Iceland is the only part of Europe that never begat monarchs or a hereditary aristocracy, and I hoped to find here a kind of perfection of the democratic ideal, or at least a hopeful indication of what could be.