Winter is a great time to be a homebody. The comforts of home are all the more appealing when sidewalks are icy and permacloud reigns. “Amateur hour,” true homebodies might say: “Talk to me in June.”
I’ve never identified as a homebody. Most of my life has been characterized by wanderlust. But an old friend recently called me one, and she knows me well enough that I had to reassess. It’s good to have friends who see you better than you see yourself.
I suppose age has a lot to do with it. I’ve always been an introvert, but as I get older, I have less energy and I look for fewer answers outside myself. So yes, being a homebody is all the fusty things: slippers and mugs of tea and attacking that stack of books with a cat on my lap—but it is also a glorious freedom to create a world.
Most spiritual, intellectual and artistic work happens when we are left to our own devices. When the outside chatter is stilled. If, as Eudora Welty wrote, “All serious daring starts from within,” there is much to discover without ever leaving home.
There are stellar literary antecedents for the homebody. Consider the famously cloistered Emily Dickenson and Marcel Proust: Who since has plumbed the depths of the human soul or observed its surroundings so astutely?
Xavier de Maistre is perhaps a lesser-known example. This young soldier, placed under house arrest for dueling in 1790, animated his space with memories of absent loves, imagined dialogues with classical figures, and loving attention to familiar objects: an armchair, a painting, the contents of his writing desk. His popular domestic travelogue, Journey Around My Room, has a chapter for each of the 42 days of his confinement, a literal quarantine—from quarantaine, French for 40-something. (He even followed it up with a sequel, A Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room.)
Our own quarantine, during the pandemic, showed many of us what a pared-down life looked like. It gave us permission to say no to almost everything, and especially roles we felt ambivalent about. We were changed by it, and much like inflated prices, we may never go back, entirely.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I like feeling less pressure about how I spend my free time and energy—and with whom I spend it. A national rise in social isolation was documented long before the COVID-19 era, and loneliness, they say, is as deadly as smoking—but being alone is not the same as loneliness.
Being a homebody doesn’t necessarily mean being alone. You may have a houseful of people where you live. Nor does it have to mean being indoors, if you live on a farm or in a house with a yard. But it generally implies a certain interiority, mental and physical.
The autonomy of that interior space allows for great peace, creativity, focus and flourishing. During the hours spent in the sanctuary of our own making, we learn to appreciate the beauty at hand. We see the grace in mundane objects, what Proust called “the divine equality of all things before the sprit that contemplates them, the light that embellishes them.” Attention is the prerequisite to understanding.
Like de Maistre, we could all probably fill a quarantaine of chapters in dialogue with our rooms. At home, I spend much of my time at my desk. A flock of bird images has alighted around it. In a naive painting I bought at a used bookstore in New Zealand entitled “Smart Bird,” a bird with a pert, satisfied expression sits on its rump on a branch, skinny legs extended in front of him. In the photo below it, a bird of prey soars to the top of the frame, wings spread cruciform on both sides, in an exultant ascent. There are others, each with their own origin story and unique influence on my days. There is also a little wire bistro chair, twisted into its whimsical shape by a friend from the cap of a champagne bottle late into a dinner party. There is a gold and crimson tin box, found at an antique market in Paris, with a tableau of Grecian goddesses dancing on the top and oddly, on the interior, a finely detailed black-and-white lithograph of a factory, complete with chimneys majestically polluting the sky. I keep paperclips in it.
I wish I could remember more about the intimate landscapes from other ages of my life. I wish I had fewer pictures of me posing in front of a body of water on vacation and more images of my dresser tops. What was on my desk, distracting me, as I wrote papers in college? How did the light come in at the end of the day? What hung on the fridge in Brooklyn? I do have photos of the top of my squat refrigerator in Paris, the bottles of oil, wine and spice foreign-looking even to me, now.
Each place is a different chapter, with the minutiae revealing the story, as they always do. Over time, all the small quotidian things in our domestic sphere that we invest with meaning shape us as much as we shape our environment.
What, I wonder, had meant enough to me then to gather and place within my daily scope of vision? What, in my passage through life, have I held closest?
Music: "From the Morning" by Nick Drake
