The Dead Letter Department #7

(did you miss dead letter department #6? catch up here!)

reading room

Well, I finally finished Edith Wharton & Ogden Codman, Jr’s The Decoration of Houses, which is exactly as stylish and makes just as many assumptions about the reader’s wealth as you would expect. The buildings described as ‘small’ or less ‘grand’ houses are by any measure mansions, and the amount of time devoted to stashing servants out of sight (and sometimes out of doors) is appalling—imagine a mindframe in which all of your worldly comforts are dependent on other people’s labor, and your only concern is making their limited shelter as aesthetically invisible as possible.

Actually, you don’t have to imagine it, we’re still living in that world. We still assume the audience, we’ll still do just about anything to not have to see who suffers for our comfort.

[full disclosure—this particular train of thought set me back so far I had to go sit on the couch in the other room and stare into the internet for a while, but I’m back at it now.]

The history of interior design & furniture is genuinely fascinating, though. I find myself thinking about Wharton & Codman’s sense of proportion and scale whenever I look at new rooms—in photographs & videos, obviously, since I have not been in a new room since the pandemic began. The chapters on the schoolroom & nursery are particularly interesting because they presuppose that developing the correct appreciation for beauty is a moral imperative, that good taste is both singular and objective, and, perhaps most importantly, that it can be taught

Here’s just a taste for you, from an early chapter:

“But it must never be forgotten that everyone is unconsciously tyrannized over by the wants of others,—the wants of dead and gone predecessors, who have an inconvenient way of thrusting their different habits and tastes across the current of later existences. The unsatisfactory relations of some people with their rooms are often to be explained in this way. It is only an unconscious extension of the conscious habit which old-fashioned people have of clinging to their parents’ way of living.”

to sleep, perchance to annoy

I’ve been talking to a lot of people with insomnia lately, both pandemic & long-standing, but I’m having the opposite problem. All my body wants to do is sleep; all my mind wants to do is shut down (this tiktok song has been in my head a LOT), but this was a much better proposition before my mind started peeling back the subtlety on all of my dreams and presenting me with barely disguised subtext instead, the merest gossamer shade of metaphor thrown over it. Oh, here’s the thing you want most, only in your dream you’re just going to sit there dialing and dialing, the phone always slipping out of your hand before you can make the phone call that would finally bring it to you. Worried about your relationship with this beloved person? No need, they’ve decided to never speak to you again. They don’t have any idea why you’re so upset about it because you were never important to them anyway. Yes, the world has changed forever, and no, you don’t have any idea where things are anymore. Best of luck frantically hunting for necessities among the smoking ruins!

It’s like my subconscious is using up all the delicacy available to me during the day so it just spends the nights whaling away at me with a cracked two-by-four. I miss flying dreams, or the one where I get to go back to Kauai and float in those enormous blue waves.

Once in a while when I wake up in the middle of the night from these excruciating obviousnesses I find I’ve got hold of some little idea, the way to link two plot points that didn’t quite connect before, or the last loop of logic in an essay. Usually I email myself (terrible idea, shooting all of your phone’s light and notifications into your sleepy eyeballs, but scrambling for paper & pen ends up inkier than is desired in the dark) so I don’t forget by morning, & it’s always a nice surprise to find I solved a problem I don’t remember.

Of course it doesn’t always work that way—sometimes the emails from me to me are purest nonsense. I’m still puzzling, years later, over the one that just said SWALLOW A SWORD. Was it a plot? A title? Most horrifyingly—advice?

other senses

Today’s perfume is Eiderantler, also by January Project.

Another green scent, but earthier then last week’s manicured lawn. Saplings, leaning together, pushing up out of the moss; a young forest, growing fast. There’s something mysterious a couple layers down, too, something else walking in the woods with you, just out of sight.

one good thing

I got my mom a vaccine appointment, & she’s already had the first shot. She’s immune compromised in about seventy ways so a lot of this past year has felt like I’ve been sweatily rolling her around in a giant hamster ball that is also made of glass. It was the dystopian edition of getting concert tickets—her doctor’s office announced when the slots were dropping and we assembled five minutes beforehand in her kitchen, her on her phone, me on her laptop as the faster typist. I tried to snag one of the first appointments on the calendar as soon as it appeared on the website but then a little sunbeam of sense shone down upon me & I realized everyone would be doing that. Instead I scooted all the way to the end of the month and the end of the day I was looking at. We were lucky; all the doses were gone in five minutes. May you be lucky as well, friends.

write back

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