“Better paint your house your own complexion: let it turn pale or blush for you.”
—Walden and Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau laments the division of labor that prohibits man from building his own dwelling. By the personal investment of constructing a house “the necessities and character of the indweller” become revealed in its timber, and the house becomes imbued with a personal virtue. Beauty then, he reasons, is derived from a self-sufficiency and practicalness that no pretty architect nor pretending painter can replicate.
No doubt potters who eat with their own dishes are excused from such clownish characterizations. I would that I could paint my door as red as a big, round nose. Or that house colors really did reflect the complexion of physiognamies. But this is not for exteriors and facades to accomplish is it?
Um, I hate to state the obvious, dear, but he was exaggerating. It’s a literary technique he was quite fond of.
Furthermore, to the extent to which he was serious (and that, too was a great deal—Thoreau was also a “true believer”), he was writing figuratively.
Then there’s the simple fact that our ways of living have truly alienated us from that which we own and that which we make. It’s a simple Marxian precept felt strongly by Thoreau, whose essential American-ness allowed him a certain optimism on that score disallowed by Marx’s class-bound Europe. Whether or not what we build truly reflects ourselves is beside the point; they do symbolically and spiritually if we have had a hand in their coming-into-being.
This is, perhaps, why woodworking has become so popular of late, and gardening, and all the minor hobby-craftsmanships: as numbed as we are by consuming, by living at one remove from what we own, from what we read, watch and learn, that we’re desperate for some semblance of authenticity, something we can see the hand in, and not merely the ghost-marks of a machine.
Yes, I failed to get back to that point and thus ended up taking the sarcastic quote out of context. Sorry about the faux pas, monsieur, and for rambling nonsensically.
Don’t feel badly about it: mystericalism is so often confused by the linear male as hystericalism.
You were just circling back to it instead of violating the subject with a brute ordinality. Do you see how quick to judge they are? How inorga(sm)nic?