MY 110 YEAR OLD APARTMENT
The following two quotes, from the beginning of the first millennium AD and the end of the second respectively, are longer than usual. Please do read them.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Chapter Two: Section 13. Written 161 - 180 AD:
Nothing is more miserable than the one who is always out and about, running round everything in circles — in Pindar’s words ‘delving deep into the bowels of the earth’ — and looking for signs and symptoms to divine his neighbor’s minds. He does not realize that it is sufficient to concentrate solely on the divinity within himself and to give it true service. That service is to keep it uncontaminated by passion, triviality, or discontent at what is dealt with by gods or men. What comes from the gods demands reverence for their goodness. What comes from men is welcome for their kinship’s sake, but sometimes pitiable also, in a way, because of their ignorance of good and evil: and this is no less a disability than that which removes the distinction of light and dark.
Aldous Huxley from his chapter on Silence, in The Perennial Philosophy. Published the month WWII ended, in 1945:
Molinos (and doubtless he was not the first to use this classification) distinguished three degrees of silence - silence of the mouth, silence of the mind and silence of the will. To refrain from idle talk is hard; to quiet the gibbering of memory and imagination is much harder; hardest of all is to still the voices of craving and aversion within the will.
The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire – we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course than the ear-drums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions–news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego’s central core of wish and desire. Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on woodpulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose – to prevent the will from ever achieving silence. Desirelessness is the condition of deliverance and illumination.
The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass production is universal craving. Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify craving – to extend and intensify, that is to say, the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught) is the principal cause of suffering and wrongdoing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its divine Ground.
Silence and solitude. No two virtues have eluded me more in this life. I’m a deranged extrovert driven by undulating bouts of deep insecurity and gargantuan egotism, often simultaneously (“[we] contain multitudes”). These are symptoms of addiction, a congenital ailment from which I’ve been in remission for three years come December 21st of this year as a sober man. I plan to address that story at some other point; for now,
I’d like to explore the geography of my one hundred and ten year old apartment through the lens of "solitude”. There has been no better time in the last century than now, in the heights of the coronavirus pandemic, to slow down.
I’ll say it again, for the vast majority of my life I’ve been the worst among sinners in regards to time spent in reflection. If I were a car my fuel would be external validation, an energy source for which I’ve mined in every possible nook and cranny of this God forsaken planet. This fuel serves but one purpose: to drive me as far away from my center as possible. There’s only one problem.
The world isn’t flat. It’s round.
Drive away from yourself and yes, you may cut corners and lose sight for a bit. Maybe a day, maybe a year. Yet eventually, you’ll end up right where you began.
The great thinkers in history have all professed the necessity Socrates’ point:
γνῶθι σεαυτόν
Gnothi seauton
“Know thyself”
Truth be told, this was likely stated earlier than Socrates, and could be found inscribed, along with the others among the 147 Delphic Maxims, on the Temple of Apollo. Yet only three among them were written in the portico for view upon entrance to the sacred space; it is telling that gnothi seauton was written first.
Knowing anyone starts with spending time with them one on one, ourselves being no exception. Spending time alone was never something I enjoyed. In fact, I’ve largely feared it. I saw the bifurcation of humans into introverts and extroverts as being static, unchangeable, mutually exclusive, intrinsic.
Until, that is, a global pandemic forced us all inside.
The transition has not been easy. I spent the first several months of it all feeling both lethargic and antsy at the same time, wanting to move about but having nowhere to go. In large part I attribute this to being back home in my native California, which though heaven-on-Earth from some perspectives, is nevertheless anticlimactic when posed alongside a chaotic place like Bedford-Stuyvesant, let alone Lower Manhattan.
And yet this was a good thing. Like many of us, I was highly unlikely to be the one who’d bring my own velocity down a notch. It turns out it’s easier to rush through a giant city than saunter through it, and harder still to sit and examine who you really are. I say this in spite of being someone who meditates for over an hour a day. Even with that practice, it’s somehow made endurable by the oxymoronic and subconscious reassurance that when the hour’s up, I can go back to rushing about town and ignoring my problems.
Over time, months in this case, introversion did creep its way in. I stopped checking in on friends as often, began to read even more, and turned slow walks into the highlight of my day. I won’t say I fell in love with the pandemic and its many horrors, but oddly, it kinda works for me. Nor did I achieve the serenity or levels of contemplation that Thoreau did in his essay Walking, but I did find time to smell the roses. When the entirety of the world stops for arguably the first time in modern history, it’s quite a thing to witness. Watching the perennial smog over Catalina Island and Los Angeles dissipate for no other reason that the fact that we all collectively agreed to go inside for awhile was an impressionable site to behold. It left an impact on me, me, this obnoxious extrovert, and led to a strange obsession for which I’ve now discovered I’m quite late to the party:
“Homemaking”
I’m not sure how else to label the topic, save for stealing the title of the aptly named blog Apartment Therapy. It’s exactly that, therapy, and it can unravel in an infinite number of stages. This is a bit of a stretch, and worse still it’s campy, but the idea of comparing the stages of homemaking to those of spiritual and psychological development came to me as a lame jest in the shower and I’m going to test this one out here, without shame. Hear me out…
Phase One - “Running Around” - First, there’s the search for a place. As detailed in the whimsical NYTimes article last week, “Zillow Surfing is The Escape We All Need Right Now”, there’s this intense desire to imagine the many routes one’s life could take. We’re largely focused on the big picture and there’s little consideration of the minute interior details as much so as fantasizing about where life could lead and worse, how others are living life out in ways for which we’re envious. We start with the filter setting on small studio apartment, only to find 18 tabs open looking at mega-mansions in countries we’ve never been to and filters applied to ensure that our new imaginary place will fit the five cars we don’t yet own. The early stages of spiritual development, or rather the life we lead up until we dive into spirituality, much resembles this. We’re constantly pulled in all directions, undulating about, rarely spending more than a few seconds looking at what might be inside.
Phase 2 -Picking A Lane - Next, after some hectic running around and settling on a home, we zero in on a neighborhood, sign a lease or mortgage and begin the process of settling down. We’ve at least committed to a geographic area, and with that commitment comes the initial degree of consistency required to know a place. We get our keys, walk into an empty and awkward space and wonder how on Earth it will ever come to appear livable, let alone at ease. We walk the neighborhood, get our bearings, and start to consider what life might look like if we stick around for awhile. Still, for some time we’re left with that strange feeling of coming home to somewhere feeling foreign, with strange linoleum from 1982 peeling back to reveal equally disappointing DIY tiling from 1935. Hideous fluorescent lights reveal layers of detritus in the floor and carpets left by residents of the past. Somehow, there is always a misshapen key left in a drawer with no context and four sun-bleached Uno cards (no Wild Draw or Skip Cards, we’ve found an underwhelming hand of 2’s, 5’s and 7’s). In spirituality, we begin to funnel our curiosity around The Big Questions into a particular tradition versus scattering about, slowly learning its orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and cultural nuances and how our inquiries might be chewed on within their confines. These tools became the “apartment walls” in our analogy, giving us at least a starting point in laying the groundwork to come.
Phase Three - The Heavy Lifting -In spirituality and in life, most people unfortunately have others do this for them. Whether it be lifting the weight of a couch up a four floor walk up or taking on daily practices of prayer, liturgy and contemplation, the great majority of us tend to allow other human beings to get their hands dirty on our behalf. What results is a detrimental disassociation with the degree of effort required for progress. In the first part of our analogy, laypeople peruse Pinterest and see maximalist apartments with kitschy nick-nacks collected in decades of travel and think “I can replicate that if I just buy shit on Etsy and Anthropologie”. What’s lost is the sentimental value behind each piece and the sum total of intrinsic meaning that each item contributes to the spirit of the dwelling.
In the second part of our analogy, laypersons let others give them Bible verses, quotes from Kabir, apps that fast track meditation, self-help guides and sermons that effectively relay the experience of the orator as if to say “don’t worry, I’ve already lived through this one so you can just repeat after me and you’ll not need to digest this text on your own nor relate your own experiences to it”.
When we don’t do the heavy lifting…we’re not empirically familiarized with just how much determination it takes to get to the point of self-knowing and being ourselves.
TL DR: You can learn a lot about yourself pushing a faux velvet sectional up a not-air-conditioned stairwell in on a mid-Atlantic August afternoon.
Phase Four - Making It Our Own - In this phase, we branch out and begin the process of allowing our identity to reveal itself. To reference Pinterest again, it’ll be painfully obvious to any visitor in your home if you simply copy a run-of-the-mill aesthetic of the Internet. The folks who tend to excel in “homemaking” are not surprisingly those who aren’t afraid to add their own bizarre taste to the mix. Save for the select few of you who prefer stone-cold concrete ultra-modern interiors that feel more like a sequel to the 1997 dystopian sci-fi Gattica than any sense of a home, we’re going to be drawn to sanctuaries that radiate with personal expression, individualism and authenticity. The same can be said of human beings to other human beings.
This phase takes the most time. It shows, too, in those who don’t work it. There’s nothing worse than a dogmatic person who’s never read the great texts of other traditions and yet believes theirs to be The One. There’s nothing more awful than a restaurant that has millenial pink, a neon sign and a flamingo with a fig plant worked in somewhere.
If there’s ever been a time to dive within and stop caring about pleasing others or following the herd (in religion or in Dwell Magazine),
Welcome to the year Two Thousand and Twenty.
Phase Five - Hosting The Party
This phase is less so a phase and more an ongoing celebration of our true selves. Whether it be having people over to our place (covid notwithstanding) to enjoy our outward articulation of who we are or more subtlely sharing our interior self with others in our daily interactions with the people around us, the release of our individual spirit out into the world is a continual cause for celebration.
My apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
My apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
I’ve commented on the idea in other photos in this article but there’s something to be said about “staging” where you live for yourself. I try to leave out books so that I come home or wind down from work in a relaxing space. This collection of all of Hemingway’s short stories tends to be the main stay on the end of my bed. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
The fire escape outside my window, intact from 1910. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
Looking back into the apartment from out on the fire escape. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
Mulberry Street from my apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
The view from my apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
The view from my apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
My apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
My apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
My apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
Old and new issues of The New York Times and The Economist tend to be scattered across all 500 square feet of my apartment at any given time. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
My apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
My apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
My apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
My apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
My apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
My apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
My apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
My apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
No, it’s not staged. I’m just obsessive. Note that the blue pen no longer has the label on it, an anxiety-inducing inconsistency that I hope to address in the next week to five years or so. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
I believe we can all benefit by having at least three “emergency” books within an arm’s reach at all times. For me, they’re the Bhagavad Gita, The Upanishads, and most of Emerson’s Essays. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
My apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
Some of my favorite records. Featured is The Grateful Dead’s Europe ‘72 , one of my favorite live album, up there with Santana’s era-defining performance at Woodstock, Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii, and The Allman Brothers At Fillmore East. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
If it appears that I’ve staged the copies of Apartamento around my house, I have. It’s one of my favorite independent magazines and a go-to for three minutes here, five minutes there of resetting in between a call or task.
My apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
My apartment. Little Italy, NYC. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
From the roof looking East, towards Chinatown just 100 yards away and onward towards the Lower East Side. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
Looking to the North from my roof, with Midtown in the background and the Empire State Building dominating the cityscape. In the middle-ground and to the left stands the dome of the Old Police Headquarters. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
Looking to the North up through the heart of Little Italy. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
The view looking south, across Tribeca and up to the Word Trade Center. It’s difficult to convey in writing the impression its size has on me in person, not only as the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere but in its unique and monolithic design. It’s my favorite building in New York, perhaps tied with the Radiator Building. Kodak Portra 800. Pentax K1000.
About my place:
I almost forgot to discuss the actual subject matter at hand. New York is known for a baffling breadth of architecture and lived experiences, from The Bronx to South Brooklyn. Brand new super skyscrapers with the most expensive listings of all time look down on two hundred year old apartments. For me, I’m all about the former tenement housing of lower Manhattan (and of course Brooklyn’s brownstones but who isn’t). The tenements originally housed millions of immigrants from all over the globe in crowded, inhospitable conditions. Many of them still stand and contain modified layouts that retain much of the original detailing.
This summer I was lucky enough to find a building in Little Italy that’s 110 years old (1910) with original flooring and its crown molding still intact. The cabinets and fire escape are likewise still standing and the building itself is so old that the floor and walls lean enough to the side to be visibly noticeable. The quirkiness only adds to its success as an empty palette for making my home.
I’m nowhere near finishing it all out, but already one will notice that time old strategies can encourage personality and taste in one pass. Namely, surrounding yourself with books ensures you rely on those who’ve already made mistakes over the eons (see last post) and positioning mementos of the traditions to which your drawn can encourage one to prioritize overarching values against the drudgery and absurdism of daily life. For me, it’s having the three texts that I rely on at a hand’s length (Emerson’s Essays, The Bhagavad Gita, and The Upanishads), then prayer beads from a trip to India with which I perform japa every morning at the ready in case life throws a curveball.
A calculator and color-coordinated pens with notepad in case I need to write down an entertaining idea. A small Japanese bowl to hold keys takes the duty of mitigating my ADHD that Ritalin would otherwise bear. A statue of Shiva reminds me that I’m part of something bigger than I am. Back issues of The Economist filled with brilliant weekly commentary stand as stark reminders that I still don’t possess even a measly fraction of understanding of the world outside my door.
A yellow pen because it looks good, even though I’ll never use it.
Plants, to remind me what was here before New York ever was.
And SPQR by Mary Beard, to serve as a metaphor and actual refresher that all worlds one day crumble, whether those of the glorious Roman Empire or merely my own singular, mortal life.
A liberating realization, one that when embodied frees us up to stop worrying about how we’re perceived, to fight the good fight,
and enter into the joy of revealing who we truly are.
