Fernando Pessoa The Book of Disquiet Serpent’s Tail, London, 1991
p.94
I know, I know . . . It’s the time when everyone has lunch or takes a break. Everything floats blithely by on the surface of life. Even while I lean out over the verandah as if it were a ship’s rail looking out over a new landscape, I too sleep. I let go of all tormenting thoughts as if I really were living in the provinces. And, suddenly, something else arises, wraps about me, takes hold of me: behind the midday scene I see the entire life of that provincial town; I see the immense foolish happiness of domesticity, of life in the fields, of contentment in the midst of banality. I see because I see. But then I see no more and I wake up. I look around, smiling, and before I do anything else, I brush down the elbows of my suit, a dark suit unfortunately, made dusty from leaning on the balustrade of the verandah that no one has bothered to clean, not realising that one day it would be required, if only for a moment, to be the rail (free from all possible dust) of a ship setting sail on an endless cruise.
These are the moments that an architect must consider when designing places for people - when shaping everything. Here one thinks of Louis Kahn who spoke of providing perhaps a wider sill as a ledge on a landing, offering an aged person a place to casually pause and rest with some gentle dignity, without having to suffer the embarrassment of fatigue. These are little things, but they are critical if we are to encompass all varieties of experience with a caring subtlety and knowing ease.
Peter Read’s Returning to Nothing The Meaning of Lost Places, Oxford, Melbourne, 1996 comes to mind too: it reveals how place holds meaning in the feelings for tiny things, and memory, not in the admiration of spectacular displays.
We seem to concentrate only on the exclamatory, grand gestures today, that seek the unique amazement of our attention with things startlingly bespoke, while the little things are left buried in the tense struggle of an inner silence, ignored as an irrelevance, trampled by distracting nuisances left to be repeatedly dusted away, brushed down, discarded in our constant effort to maintain some degree of contented sanity and satisfaction in well-being.
Grand gestures declare, dominate, demean, and demand with their bold, mocking superiority; they belittle, put down with their entertainment, rather than enrich or uplift. We are left struggling, disturbed, trying to dismiss, discard, and disregard as we seek substance and soul otherwise in our lives, instead of finding an instinctively innate support in having the little things, the ephemeral, fragile feelings, fancies, and affections and their forms and gestures accommodated; enhanced; embalmed in place, (balm as in a fragrant cream or liquid used to heal or soothe), waiting with a knowing patience to be – for the anticipated meeting with the other, if only for a moment.
We must remember how a balustrade could become a ship’s rail; and other things, everything, much more and diverse too, rather than consider only arresting, grand displays or functional necessities – as if feelings and matters subtle weren’t important.
Good design knows otherwise.
NOTE
For more on Casa Pessoa, see:
https://www.casafernandopessoa.pt/en/cfp/virtual-visit
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