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Luring the six years of my architectural education the subject of comfort was mentioned only once. It was by a mechanical engineer whose job it was to initiate my classmates and me into the mysteries of air conditioning and heating. He described something called the “comfort zone,” which, as far as I can remember, was a kidney-shaped, crosshatched area on a graph that showed the relationship between temperature and humidity. Comfort was inside the kidney, discomfort was everywhere else. This, apparently, was all that we needed to know about the subject. It was a curious omission from an otherwise rigorous curriculum; one would have thought that comfort was a crucial issue in preparing for the architectural profession, like justice in aw, or health in medicine.

I write, then, from ignorance. I do not apologize for this, for, as Milan Kundera once said, “To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.” This book is not intended to convince, it is an attempt, rather, to discover — first of all for myself — the meaning of comfort.

Domesticity proved to be an idea that had almost nothing to do with technology, or at least an idea in which technology was a distinctly secondary consideration.

I had designed and built houses, and the experience was sometimes disturbing, for I found that the architectural ideals that I had been taught in school frequently disregarded — if they did not altogether contradict — my clients’ conventional notions of comfort

It was only when my wife and I built our own home that I discovered at first hand the fundamental poverty of modern architectural ideas. I found myself turning again and again to memories of older houses, and older rooms, and trying to understand what had made them feel so right, so comfortable.

However, insofar as there is such reference to a historic past, the peculiarity of 'invented' traditions is that the continuity with it is largely factitious.

The first thing that strikes us about Lauren’s clothes is how American they look. They are based on recognizable homegrown images: the western ranch, the prairie farm, the Newport mansion, the Ivy League college. The feeling of deja vu is intentional: Lauren is an orchestrator of images. Although his clothes are not faithful replicas of period dress, their appearance does reflect popular ideas about various romantic periods of American history. We have seen them all before. In paintings, in photographs, on television, and, especially, in films.

This inclination to be a costumer, along with a career built as much on advertising as on fashion shows and Vogue magazine, has not assured Lauren a secure position in the fashion world. It is unlikely that there will ever be a Ralph Lauren retrospective at the Metroplitan Museum, as there was in 1984 for Yves Saint Laurent.

Lauren was never a couturier; from the beginning he was concerned with massproduced clothing, and so he acquired an understanding of popular instead of elite tastes. His renown as a designer has been the result of his commercial success, not vice versa. His influence on the way that Americans dress is often overlooked, precisely because it has been indirect. Most of the women who copied Diane Keaton’s loose tweed jackets or oversized men’s shirts in 1977 were unaware that they were imitating Lauren originals. The 1980s fashion for Ivy League clothes — the so-called preppy look—was also Lauren-inspired.

What does this have to do with domestic comfort? In 1984, Ralph Lauren announced that he was entering the home furnishings field. The only surprise is that it took him so long. The relationship between clothing and interior decoration is venerable. Look at a Hogarth painting of an early Georgian interior. The soft curves of the carved furniture were a counterpart to the rich costumes of the time and complemented the voluminous gowns of the women and the lace fronts and elaborate wigs of the men. The slightly pompous interiors of the nineteenth century also reflected clothing fashions; skirted chairs and gathered draperies imitated the details of how cloth was used in skirts and gowns, and wallpaper copied the designs used in fabrics. The richness of Art Deco furniture mirrored its owners’ luxurious costumes.

This acute awareness of tradition is a modern phenomenon that reflects a desire for custom and routine in a world characterized by constant change and innovation. Reverence for the past has become so strong that when traditions do not exist, they are frequently invented. After England adopted a national anthem in the mid-eighteenth century, most European nations quickly followed suit. The results were sometimes curious. Denmark and Germany, for instance, simply set their own words to the English music. Switzerland still sings “Ruft die mein Vaterland” to the strains of “God Save the King,” and until Congress adopted an official national anthem—in 1931— Americans sang “My Country Tis of Thee” to the same regal music. The “Marseillaise” is original, and authentic; it was written during the French Revolution. But Bastille Day was first celebrated in 1880, a hundred years after the actual event.

Another example of invented tradition is the popular fashion for so-called Early American or Colonial furniture. In most people’s imagination it represents a link to the values of the Founding Fathers, the Spirit of ’76, an integral part of the national heritage. The truth is that the Colonial style owes its existence not to an unbroken continuity passed from colonial father to republican son, but to the much more recent Centennial celebrations of 1876. The Centennial encouraged the founding of many so-called patriotic societies, such as the Sons (now defunct) and the Daughters (still active) of the American Revolution, the Colonial Dames of America, and the Society of Mayflower Descendants. This new interest in genealogy was due partly to the Centennial itself, and partly to efforts by the established middle class to distance itself from the increasing number of new, predominantly non British immigrants. This process of cultural authentification was fortified by furnishing homes in the so-called Colonial style, thus underlining the link to the past. Like most invented traditions, the Colonial revival was also a reflection of its own time—the nineteenth century. Its visual taste was influenced by the then current English architectural fashion — Queen Anne — which had nothing to do with the Pilgrim Fathers, but whose cozy hominess appealed to a public sated by the extravagances of the Gilded Age.

What is also striking about these handsome interiors is the absence of so many of the things that characterize modern life. We look in vain for clock-radios, electric hair dryers, or video games. There are pipe racks and humidors in the bedrooms, but no cordless telephones, no televisions. There may be snowshoes hanging on the cabin wall, but there are no snowmobile boots by the door. In the tropical setting we glimpse an overhead fan instead of an air-conditioning unit. The mechanical paraphernalia of contemporary living has been put away, and replaced by brass-cornered gun boxes, silver bedside water carafes, and leather-bound books. Admittedly, these tableaux are not real interiors but only backdrops designed to set off the fabrics, tableware, and bedclothes that form the Furnishings Collection; it is unlikely that anyone would ever furnish his or her home to look like the Lauren publicity brochures. But that is beside the point; advertisements often represent a not altogether real, stylized world, but one which does reflect society’s view of how things ought to be. These themes have been chosen to evoke popular images that are informal and comfortable, reminiscent of wealth, stability, and tradition. What they leave out is as revealing as what they include.

So the modern world is kept at bay. These office interiors, like the settings of the Lauren Collection, present the appearance of a way of life that no longer exists. Their reality is no deeper than the flocked covering on the wall; a cynic would point out that the lady in the Louis XVI office was actually born in Queens, and Mr. Forbes in Brooklyn (Lauren, that other anglophile, grew up in the Bronx). But whether the way of life is remembered, or simply imagined, it nevertheless signifies a widely held nostalgia. Is it simply a curious anachronism, this desire for tradition, or is it a reflection of a deeper dissatisfaction with the surroundings that our modern world has created? What are we missing that we look so hard for in the past?

there is comfort in this confusion; only when a chapter is finished, and my desk is once again immaculately empty, do I feel a sense of unease. Like a blank page, a neat desk can intimidate. Hominess is not neatness. Otherwise everyone would live in replicas of the kinds of sterile and impersonal homes that appear in interior-design and architectural magazines. What these spotless rooms lack, or what crafty photographers have carefully removed, is any evidence of human occupation. In spite of the artfully placed vases and casually arranged art books, the imprint of their inhabitants is missing. These pristine interiors fascinate and repel me. Can people really live without clutter? How do they stop the Sunday papers from spreading over the living room? How do they manage without toothpaste tubes and half-used soap bars in their bathrooms? Where do they hide the detritus of their everyday lives?

To begin with, he would not understand the question. “What exactly do you mean by comfortable?” he might respond in puzzled curiosity.

The word “comfortable” did not originally refer to enjoyment or contentment. Its Latin root was confortare — to strengthen or console—and this remained its meaning for centuries. We use it this way when we say “He was a comfort to his mother in her old age.” It was in this sense that it was used in theology: the “Comforter” was the Holy Spirit. Along the way, “comfort” also acquired a legal meaning: in the sixteenth century a “comforter” was someone who aided or abetted a crime. This idea of support was eventually broadened to include people and things that afforded a measure of satisfaction, and “comfortable” came to mean tolerable or sufficient — one spoke of a bed of comfortable width, although not yet of a comfortable bed. This continues to be the meaning of the expression “a comfortable income” — ample but not luxurious. Succeeding enerations expanded this idea of convenience, and eventually “comfortable” acquired its sense of physical well-being and enjoyment, but not until the eighteenth century, long after Diirer’s death. Sir Walter Scott was one of the first novelists to use it this new way when he wrote, “Let it freeze without, we are comfortable within.” Later meanings of the word were almost exclusively concerned with contentment, often of a thermal variety: “comforter” in secular Victorian England no longer referred to the Redeemer, but to a long woolen scarf; today it describes a quilted bed coverlet.

Words are important. Language is not just a medium, like a water pipe, it is a reflection of how we think. We use words not only to describe objects but also to express ideas, and the introduction of words into the language marks the simultaneous introduction of ideas into the consciousness. As Jean Paul Sartre wrote, “Giving names to objects consists in moving immediate, unreflected, perhaps ignored events on to the plane of reflection and of the objective mind.”

Take a word like “weekend,” which originated at the end of the nineteenth century. Unlike the medieval “weekday” that distinguished the days that one worked from the Lord’s Day, the profane “weekend” — which originally described the period when shops and businesses were closed—came to reflect a way of life organized around the active pursuit of leisure. The English word, and the English idea, has entered many languages in unchanged form {le weekend, el weekend, das weekend). Another example. Our grandparents inserted paper rolls into their player pianos. As far as they were concerned, the piano and the piano roll formed part of the same machine. We, on the other hand, draw a distinction between the machine and the instructions that we give it. We call the machine hardware, and to describe the instructions we have invented a new word, “software.” This is more than jargon; the word represents a different way of thinking about technology. Its addition to the language marks an important moment.

The Middle Ages are an opaque period of history that is open to many interpretations. As a French scholar has written, “The Renaissance viewed medieval society as scholastic and static, the Reformation saw it as hierarchical and corrupt, and the Age of Enlightenment considered it to have been irrational and superstitious.” The nineteenth-century Romantics, who idealized the Middle Ages, described them as the antithesis of the Industrial Revolution. Writers and artists like Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin popularized the image of the Middle Ages as an unmechanical, rustic arcadia. This latest revision has greatly influenced our own view of the Middle Ages, and has given rise to the idea that medieval society was both untechnological, and uninterested in technology.

This notion is altogether mistaken. The Middle Ages not only produced illuminated books, but also eyeglasses, not only the cathedral, but also the coal mine. Revolutionary changes occurred in both primary industry and manufacturing. The first recorded instance of mass production — of horseshoes — occurred during the Middle Ages. Between the tenth and the thirteenth century, a technological boom produced the mechanical clock, the suction pump, the horizontal loom, the waterwheel, the windmill, and even, on both shores of the English Channel, the tidal mill. Agricultural innovations formed the economic foundation for all this technical activity. The deep plow and the idea of crop rotation increased productivity as much as fourfold, so that agricultural yields in the thirteenth century would not be surpassed for another five hundred years. Far from being a technological Black Hole, the Middle Ages marked the authentic beginning of industrialization in Europe. The period’s influence was felt until at least the eighteenth century in all aspects of everyday life, including attitudes toward the home.

Medieval popular art, which we appreciate for its simple beauty, was prized by its makers even more for its splendor and pomp. Its overdecorated sumptuousness, which we often overlook, is evidence of what was needed to make an impression on a public whose sensibilities were dulled by the wretched conditions under which they lived. The extravagant pageants and religious festivals which characterized that time can be understood not only as a celebration, but also as an antidote to the miseries of everyday life.

What places the bourgeois in the center of any discussion of domestic comfort is that unlike the aristocrat, who lived in a fortified castle, or the cleric, who lived in a monastery, or the serf, who lived in a hovel, the bourgeois lived in a house. Our examination of the home begins here.

the interiors of restored medieval houses always look empty. The large rooms have only a few pieces of furniture, a tapestry on the wall, a stool beside the large fireplace. This minimalism is not a modern affectation; medieval homes were sparsely furnished. What furniture there was was uncomplicated. Chests served as both storage and seats. The less affluent sometimes used a chest as a kind of bed — the clothes inside serving as a soft mattress. Benches, stools and demountable trestle tables were common. The beds were also collapsible, although by the end of the Middle Ages more important personages slept in large permanent beds, which usually stood in a corner. Beds also served as seats, for people sat, sprawled, and squatted wherever they could, on chests, stools, cushions, steps, and often the floor. If contemporary paintings are anything to judge by, medieval posture was a casual affair.

The Great Bed of Ware was so large that “Four couples might cosily lie side by side. And thus without touching each other abide.” How did people achieve intimacy under such conditions? It appears that they did not. Medieval paintings frequently show a couple in bed or bath, and nearby in the same room friends or servants in untroubled, and apparently unembarrassed, conversation.

We should not, however, jump to the conclusion that medieval domestic life was primitive. Bathing, for instance, was fashionable. Here the monasteries also played a role, for not only were they centers of piety, they were also centers of cleanliness. Hygiene was important to the efficiency-minded Cistercian order, for example, St. Bernard, their founder, had spelled it all out in the Rule, an operating manual that dealt not only with religious matters, but also with the mundane. The purpose of the tonsure, for instance, was not symbolic; monks’ heads were shaved to control lice. The Rule described work schedules in detail as well as the layout of the buildings, which followed a standardized plan, like businessmen’s hotels today. It has been said that a blind monk could enter any of the more than seven hundred Cistercian monasteries and not get lost.

Washing the hands before eating was another medieval politeness which has survived to the present day. Washing the hands before, after, and during the meal was necessary in the Middle Ages, because although soup spoons were used, forks were not, and people ate largely with their fingers; as in India or Saudi Arabia today, this did not imply indelicacy. Food was served on large platters, cut into smaller portions, and placed on trenchers, large slices of bread that—like Mexican tortillas or Indian chapatis—served as edible plates. The popular image of eating in the Middle Ages is one of homely meals where the food was plentiful but not very sophisticated; quite to the contrary, we would be struck by the diversity of medieval dishes. The growth of cities encouraged the exchange of commodities such as German beer, French and Italian wine, Spanish sugar, Polish salt, Russian honey, and, for the wealthy, spices from the East. Medieval food was far from bland; cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and pepper were combined with local herbs such as parsley, mint, garlic, and thyme.

Even the humbler bourgeois ate well. Here are the ingredients for “farced chycken,” a com¬ mon dish described by Chaucer: a baked chicken stuffed with lentils, cherries, cheese, ale, and oats and garnished with a sauce of “pandemayne” (fine white bread) crumbs, herbs, and salt mixed with “Romeney” (a malmsey wine).^

People in the Middle Ages did not altogether lack comfort, as I have tried to show. Their homes were neither rustic nor crude, nor should we imagine that the persons inhabiting them did so without pleasure. But what comfort there was was never explicit. What our medieval ancestors did lack was the awareness of comfort as an objective idea.

Headgear was ubiquitous, and hats were rarely removed. Important people wore them while eating, sleeping, and even bathing. It does indicate the importance that this obsessively ordered society placed on public expression and on formality, and the secondary role that it willingly assigned to personal comfort. This was especially so at the end of the Middle Ages, when conventions of dress became exaggerated to a ridiculous extent. Women wore the henning a tall conical headpiece with a trailing veil. Men wore poulaines — bizarre shoes with extremely long, pointed toes—and tunics with trailing sleeves and doublets resembling miniskirts. All who could afford it ornamented their clothes with tiny bells, colored ribbons, and precious stones. A well-dressed squire resembled Michael Jackson in a rhinestone-covered nightclub costume.

It is possible to describe how medieval people ate, dressed, and lived, but none of it makes much sense if we do not also make an effort to understand how they thought. That is difficult, for if ever the expression “a world of contrasts” applied, it was during the Middle Ages. Religiosity and avarice, delicacy and cruelty, luxury and squalor, asceticism and eroticism existed side by side. Our own more or less consistent world pales by comparison. Imagine a medieval scholar. After a morning of quiet devotion in a cathedral (which itself was a weird combination of sanctum sanctorum and bestiary), he could attend a public execution in which punishments of extreme cruelty would be carried out according to a pedantic etiquette. If he was like most people it would not be an occasion for ribaldry, but for shedding a tear as the condemned man or woman (before being dismembered) delivered a homily to the crowd. Life “bore the mixed smell of blood and of roses.” Our idea of the Middle Ages is often based on music and religious art, which give a false impression of medieval sensibilities. Celebrations, for instance, were an astonishing mixture of good and bad taste. The same scholar, invited to a court dinner, would wash his hands in perfumed water and exchange genteel courtesies with his neighbor or take part in a madrigal. At the same time he would guffaw at dwarfs jumping out of a huge baked entremet (pie), and have dishes brought to him by servitors mounted on horseback. In trying to explain the apparent incompatibility between the extreme indecency of certain customs and the modesty of behavior imposed by courtesy, Huizinga suggests that the Middle Ages consisted of two superimposed layers of civilization— one, primitive and pre-Christian, the other, more recent, courtly and religious. These two layers were frequently in conflict, and what seem to us to be inconsistent emotions are the not always successful attempts to reconcile a cruel reality with the ideal harmony that both chivalry and religion demanded. The excitable medieval mind was constantly oscillating between these opposite poles.

Why did they not simply improve their living conditions? Technical skill and ingenuity were not lacking. Part of the explanation is that people in the Middle Ages thought differently about the subject of function, especially when it came to their domestic surroundings. For us, the function of a thing has to do with its utility (the function of a chair is to be sat on, for example), and we separate this from its other attributes, such as beauty, age, or style; in medieval life there were no such distinctions. Every object had a meaning and a place in life that was as much a part of its function as its immediate purpose, and these two were inseparable. Since there was no such thing as “pure function” it was difficult for the medieval mind to consider functional improvements; that would have meant tampering with reality itself. Colors had meanings, events had meanings, names had meanings — nothing was accidental. Partly this was superstition, and partly a belief in a divinely ordered universe. Utilitarian objects such as benches and stools, since they lacked meanings, were scarcely given any thought.

The emphasis that the Middle Ages placed on ceremony underlines what John Lukacs has called the external character of medieval civilization.' What mattered then was the external world, and one’s place in it. Life was a public affair, and just as one did not have a strongly developed self-consciousness, one did not have a room of one’s own. It was the medieval mind, not the absence of comfortable chairs or central heating, that explains the austerity of the medieval home. It is not so much that in the Middle Ages comfort was unknown, as Walter Scott would have it, but rather that it was not needed.

John Lukacs points out that words such as “self-confidence,” “self-esteem,” “melancholy,” and “sentimental” appeared in English or French in their modern senses only two or three hundred years ago. Their use marked the emergence of something new in the human consciousness: the appearance of the internal world of the individual, of the self, and of the family. The significance of the evolution of domestic comfort can only be appreciated in this context. It is much more than a simple search for physical well-being; it begins in the appreciation of the house as a setting for an emerging interior life. In Lukacs’s words, “as the self-consciousness of medieval people was spare, the interiors of their houses were bare, including the halls of nobles and of kings. The interior furniture of houses appeared together with the interior furniture of minds.

The existence of rented accommodations underlines a change that had occurred since the Middle Ages: many people no longer lived and worked in the same building. Although most shopkeepers, merchants, and artisans still lived “over the store,” there was a growing number of bourgeois—builders, lawyers, notaries, civil servants—for whom the home was exclusively a residence. The result of this separation was that — as far as the outside world was concerned — the house was becoming a more private place. Together with this privatization of the home arose a growing sense of intimacy, of identifying the house exclusively with family life.

There was something about these seventeenth-century interiors that precluded a true feeling of intimacy, however. Medieval emptiness had been filled with chairs, commodes, and canopied beds, but in an almost thoughtless way. These crowded rooms were not really furnished. It is as if the owners had gone on a shopping spree and the next day discovered that there was not enough space for all their impulsive purchases. This was the result of the sort of bourgeois nervousness that Abraham Bosse satirized in his engravings, which depict people who are always, to some extent, acting, and for whom the house is above all a setting for social theater. Sandwiched as they were between the aristocracy and the lower classes, the French bourgeoisie was always striving to conform, to distance itself from the latter and achieve the standing of the former.

There were no corridors in these houses — each room was connected directly to its neighbor — and architects prided themselves on aligning all the doors enfilade, so that there was an unobstructed view from one end of the house to the other. The priority given to appearances, instead of to privacy, is evident; all traffic, servants as well as guests, passed through every room to get to the next.

What was missing in these interiors was what Mario Praz, in an idiosyncratic essay on the philosophy of interior decoration, called Stimmung — the sense of intimacy that is created by a room and its furnishings. Stimmung is a characteristic of interiors that has less to do to with functionality than with the way that the room conveys the character of its owner — the way that it mirrors his soul, as Praz poetically put it.

To find interiors that exhibited Stimmung in seventeenth century Europe it is necessary to look northward.

More important than the technical innovations were the changes in domestic arrangements. The parents still shared their bed with the infants, but the older children no longer slept in the same room. One can imagine Frederik and Marthe, after having sent the children upstairs to bed, sitting in the main room alone. The house is quiet, the day’s work is done, and in the light of a candle they talk. A simple scene, and yet a revolution in human relations is taking place. The husband and wife have begun to think of themselves — perhaps for the first time — as a couple. Even their wedding night, twenty years before, would have been a public event, celebrated with boisterous, and medieval, informality. The opportunities to experience intimacy were rare and it was in such modest, bourgeois dwellings that family life began to acquire a private dimension. The importance of this event, which is encapsulated in the Brun household but which was taking place all over northern and central Europe, cannot be exaggerated. Before the idea of the home as the seat of family life could enter the human consciousness, it required the experience of both privacy and intimacy, neither of which had been possible in the medieval hall.

The appearance of intimacy in the home was also the result of another important change that was taking place within the family: the presence of children. The medieval idea of the family was different from our own in many ways, especially in its unsentimental attitude toward childhood. Not only did the children of the poor work; in all families, children were sent away from home once they reached the age of seven. Children from bourgeois families were apprenticed to artisans, while those from the higher class served in noble households as pages. In both cases, they were expected to work as well as to learn; the servitors at medieval banquets were the sons of noble families, not paid domestics. (The French word garcon, which means both young boy and cafe waiter, recalls this practice.) The function of this apprenticeship, whether to a trade or at court, fulfilled the role of education. This situation started to change in the sixteenth century when formal schooling, which had previously been exclusively religious, was extended and replaced apprenticeship, at least among the bourgeois. Two of the Brun girls (nine and eleven years old) went to school. Although schooling was not long — the thirteen-year-old boy who worked as an apprentice to his father had already completed his education — it nevertheless meant that children spent much more time at home than in the past. Parents could, for the first time in centuries, watch their children growing up.

The presence of children of many ages also produced a change of manners that is evident in the Bruns’s sleeping arrangements. It would have been easy, and desirable, to separate the young people according to sex, but instead it was the servants and employees who had their own rooms. Even the son who was an apprentice slept with his sisters, not with his coworkers. The point was not discrimination - the bedrooms were identical — but the separation of the family members from the others. The isolation of the servants appears almost haphazard—later it would take architectural form, as servants were assigned the basement or the garret — and it was not complete, since the entire household still ate at least one meal together, but it did reinforce the growing self-awareness of the family.

The appearance of intimacy and privacy in homes in Paris and London, and soon after even in such out-of-the-way places as Oslo, was an unwitting, almost unconscious, reaction to the changing conditions of urban life, and it appeared to be more a question of popular attitudes than of anything else. It is difficult to trace the evolution of something so amorphous, and it would be dangerous to claim that there was a single place where the modern idea of the family home first entered the human consciousness. There was, after all, no identifiable moment of discovery, no individual inventor who can be credited with the intuition, no theory or treatise on the subject.

There was one place, however, where the seventeenth-century domestic interior evolved in a way that was arguably unique, and that can be described as having been, at the very least, exemplary. The United Provinces of the Netherlands was a brand-new state, formed in 1609 after thirty years of rebellion against Spain. It was among the smallest countries in Europe, with a population one-quarter that of Spain, one-eighth that of France, and with a landmass smaller than Switzerland’s. It had few natural resources—no mines, no forests—and what little land there was needed constant protection from the sea. But this “low” country surprisingly quickly established itself as a major power. In a short time it became the most advanced shipbuilding nation in the world and developed large naval, fishing, and merchant fleets. Its explorers founded colonies in Africa and Asia, as well as in America. The Netherlands introduced many financial innovations that made it a major economic force — and Amsterdam became the world center for international finance. Its manufacturing towns grew so quickly that by the middle of the century the Netherlands had supplanted France as the leading industrial nation of the world. Its universities were among the best in Europe; its tolerant political and religious climate offered a home for emigre thinkers such as Spinoza, Descartes, and John Locke. This fecund country produced not just venture capitalists and the speculative tulip trade, but also Rembrandt and Vermeer; it devised not only the first recorded war game, but also the first microscope; it invested not only in heavily armed East Indiamen but also in beautiful towns. All this occurred during a brief historical moment—barely a human lifetime — which lasted from 1609 until roughly the 1660s, and which the Dutch call their “golden age.”

At a time when the other states of Europe remained primarily rural (even in urbanized Italy, most of the people were still peasants), the Netherlands was rapidly becoming a nation of townspeople. Burghers by historical tradition, the Dutch were bourgeois by inclination.' Everyday life in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century reflected the traditional bourgeois virtues—an unruffled moderation, an admiration for hard work, and a financial prudence bordering on parsimony. Thrift evolved naturally in a society of merchants and traders who, moreover, lived in a country which required a constant communal investment in canals, dikes, sluices, and windmills to keep the North Sea at bay. They were also a simple people, less passionate than the Latins of southern Europe, less sentimental than their German neighbors, less intellectual than the French. The Dutch historian Huizinga claimed that the flat, restful landscape of polders and canals, which lacked dramatic features such as mountains or valleys, encouraged the simplicity of the Dutch character. Equally important was religion. Although only about a third of the Dutch were Calvinists, this became the state religion and exercised a major influence on everyday life, contributing a sense of sobriety and restraint to Dutch society. All these circumstances produced a people who admired saving, frowned on conspicuous spending, and naturally evolved conservative manners.

Their houses were “small houses,” literally as well as figuratively. They did not need to be large, because they contained few people; the average number of people per house in most Dutch towns was not more than four or five, compared to as many as twenty-five in a city such as Paris. Why was this? For one thing, there were no tenants, for the Dutch preferred, and were prosperous enough, to afford the luxury of owning their own homes, however small. The house had ceased to be a place of work, and as many artisans became well-to-do merchants or rentiers, they built separate establishments for their businesses, and employees and apprentices had to provide their own lodgings. Nor were there as many servants as in other countries, for Dutch society discouraged the hiring of servants and imposed special taxes on those who employed domestic help. Individual independence was more highly prized than elsewhere, and, equally importantly, it could be afforded. As a result, most homes in the Netherlands housed a single couple and their children. This brought about another change. The publicness that had characterized the “big house” was replaced by a more sedate—and more private—home life.

The emergence of the family home reflected the growing importance of the family in Dutch society. The glue that cemented this unit was the presence of children. The mother raised her own children—there were no nurses. Young children attended infant school at the age of three, and then primary school for four years. The Netherlands had, it is generally agreed, the highest level of literacy in Europe, and even secondary education was not uncommon. Most children lived at home until they were married, and the relations between Dutch parents and their children were characterized by affection, rather than by discipline. Foreign visitors considered this permissiveness to be a dangerous habit. Given the excessive indulgence with which parents treated their children, one observed, “it is surprising that there is not more disorder than there is.” For the Frenchman who wrote this, children were small and unruly, but nevertheless adults; the idea of childhood did not yet exist for him. The historian Philippe Aries has described how the substitution of school for apprenticeship throughout Europe reflected a rapprochement between parents and family, and between the concept of family and the concept of childhood. This is precisely what happened in the Netherlands, where the family centered itself on the child and family life centered itself on the home, only in the Dutch home it occurred about a hundred years earlier than elsewhere.

It was the opinion of more than one contemporary visitor that the Dutch prized three things above all else: first their children, second their homes, and third their gardens. The Dutch garden was a further indication of the transition from the communal big house to the individual family home. The typical European townhouse of this period, whether in Paris or in Oslo, was built around a courtyard which was essentially public in nature. The secluded back garden of the Dutch house was different — it was private.

The Dutch loved their homes. They shared this old Anglo Saxon word — ham, hejm in Dutch — with the other peoples of northern Europe. “Home” brought together the meanings of house and of household, of dwelling and of refuge, of ownership and of affection. “Home” meant the house, but also everything that was in it and around it, as well as the people, and the sense of satisfaction and contentment that all these conveyed. You could walk out of the house, but you always returned home.

This wonderful word, “home,” which connotes a physical “place” but also has the more abstract sense of a “state of being,” has no equivalent in the Latin or Slavic European languages. German, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Dutch, and English all have similar sounding words for “home,” all derived from the Old Norse “heima.

The Dutch affection for their homes was expressed in a singular practice: they had elaborate scale models built of their houses. These replicas are sometimes— inaccurately—referred to as dollhouses. Their function was more like that of ship models, not playthings but miniature memorials, records of dearly beloved objects. They were built like cupboards which did not represent the exterior appearance of the house. But when the doors were opened the entire interior was magically revealed, not only the rooms—complete with wall coverings and furnishings—but even paintings, utensils, and china figurines.

A German visitor to Delft in 1665 wrote that “in many houses, as in the holy places of the heathens, it is not permissible to ascend the stairs or set foot in a room without first removing one’s shoes.” This gives the impression that the streets of Dutch towns were unkempt; instead the opposite was true. Save for those in the oldest neighborhoods, where the poor lived, the streets were paved in brick, and included sidewalks for pedestrians. Whereas in London and Paris the public street was unbearable—a combination of open sewer and garbage dump—in Dutch towns this waste material was disposed of in the canals, leaving the street relatively clean. Moreover, since it was the custom for each household to wash the street in front of its house, these streets were generally as well scrubbed as the stoops. If the streets were so clean, certainly cleaner than elsewhere in Europe, how to explain this collective obsession with cleanliness inside the home?

The importance that the Dutch attached to domestic clean¬ liness is all the more striking since we know that in their personal habits the Dutch were not especially clean; there is plenty of evidence that they were considered, even by the insalubrious standards of the seventeenth century, to be dirty. “They keep their houses cleaner than their bodies,” wrote an English visitor. The Dutch house did not contain a room for bathing, for instance, and public baths were almost unknown. Bathing was further discouraged by the multiple layers of clothing that both men and women wore in the damp winters.

It is precisely because Holland’s scrubbed floors and polished brasswork did not reflect a profound understanding of health or hygiene that they are significant. The cleanliness of the Dutch interior was not simply a part of the national character, nor a response determined by external causes, but evidence of something much more important. When visitors were required to take off their shoes or put on slippers, it was not immediately on entering the house—the lower floor was still considered to be a part of the public street — but on going upstairs. That was where the public realm stopped and the home began. This boundary was a new idea, and the order and tidiness of the household were evidence neither of fastidiousness nor of a particular cleanliness, but instead of a desire to define the home as a separate, special place.

The feminization of the home in seventeenth-century Holland was one of the most important events in the evolution of the domestic interior. It had several causes, chief among them the limited use made of servants. Even the wealthiest household rarely employed more than three servants, while a typical prosperous bourgeois family included, at most, a single maid servant. Compare this to the Bruns, who had, in addition to their three employees, two servants, or to the typical British bourgeois family of that time which would have had at least half a dozen domestics. Dutch law was explicit on contractual arrangements and on the civil rights of servants, so that the relationship between employer and employee was less exploitive and closer than elsewhere in Europe; servants ate with their masters at the same table, for instance, and house¬ work was shared instead of delegated. All this produced, for the seventeenth century, a remarkable situation: Dutch married women, irrespective of their wealth or social position, did most of their own household chores. It has been recorded that when the wife of Admiral de Ruyter was visited on the day after her husband’s death by an envoy of the stadhouder, the Prince of Orange, she could not receive him, since she had recently sprained her ankle—while hanging out the laundry. When de Witte was commissioned to paint a wealthy burgher’s wife, Adriana van Heusden, he depicted her shopping with her little daughter in an Amsterdam fish market. It would be impossible to imagine a wealthy French or English lady performing the same duty, or wishing to be immortalized in such prosaic surroundings.

Dutch married women had “the whole care and absolute management of all their Domestique,” according to Temple. this small change had far-reaching consequences. When servants were doing the cooking, the room containing the kitchen was hardly differentiated from the other rooms, and was in any case accorded a secondary position. In Parisian bourgeois houses, for example, the kitchen occupied a room off the courtyard but without direct access to the main rooms. In English terrace houses the kitchen, adjacent to the servant quarters, continued to be located in the basement until the nineteenth century. In most appartements the “kitchen” was no more than a pot hanging in the fireplace.

In the Dutch home the kitchen was the most important room; according to one historian, “the kitchen was promoted to a position of fantastic dignity and became something between a temple and a museum.” Here were located the cupboards that held the prized table linens, china, and silver. Copper and brass utensils, brightly polished, hung on the walls. The chimney piece was enormous and elaborately decorated—overly so to modern tastes—and contained not only the hearth with the traditional hanging pot, but also a simple kind of stove. The sink was copper, sometimes marble. Some kitchens had interior hand pumps (one is visible in de Witte’s painting) and even reservoirs with a continuous supply of hot water. The presence of such amenities signified the growing importance of domestic work and the premium that was beginning to be placed on convenience. This was natural. For the first time, the person who was in intimate contact with housework was also in a position to influence the arrangement and disposition of the home. Servants had to put up with inconvenient and ill-thought-out arrangements because they had no say in the matter. The mistress of the house, particularly when she was as independent-minded as the Dutch woman, did not.

The notion that what is artless must be better than what is not requires a precarious leap in reasoning, but for all that it carries great weight with the American public—at least judging from the dozens of advertisements that extol “being natural.” It is a shallow conceit. A little reflection shows that all human culture is artificial, cooking no less than music, furniture no less than painting. Why prepare time-consuming sauces when a raw fruit would suffice? Why bother with musical instruments when the voice is pleasant enough? Why paint pictures when looking at nature is satisfying? Why sit up when you can squat?

The answer is that it makes life richer, more interesting, and more pleasurable. Of course furniture is unnatural; it is an artifact. Sitting is artificial, and like other artificial activities, although less obviously than cooking, instrumental music, or painting, it introduces art into living. We eat pasta or play the piano—or sit upright—out of choice, not out of need. This should be emphasized, for so much has been written about the practicality and functionality of (particularly modern) furniture that it is easy to forget that tables and chairs, unlike, for example, refrigerators and washing machines, are a refinement, not a utility.

When a person sits on the ground, he is neither comfortable nor uncomfortable. Naturally, sharp stones or unpleasant obstructions are avoided, but otherwise one flat surface is pretty much like another. Squatting is natural; that is why a person who squats considers neither how to sit nor where to sit. This is not to say that squatting is crude; as with other human activities it may involve etiquette and decorum. The Japanese, for example, never sit on the ground itself, always on a raised platform. Saudis sit on carpets of stunning beauty. The point is not that this habit is inferior, or less comfortable, but that comfort is not made explicit in either case.

Sitting on a chair is another matter. The chair may be too high or too low. It may cut into the back, or dig into the thighs. It can put the sitter to sleep, or make him fidget, or leave him with back pain. The chair must be designed to accommodate the posture of the body, and hence raises issues unlike any which face the builder of a carpeted dais or platform. Furniture forces the sitting-up civilization, sooner or later, to consider the question of comfort.

The variety of types of furniture in eighteenth-century France reflected the specialization that was taking place in the arrangement of the house; different rooms were acquiring dif¬ ferent functions. People no longer ate in anterooms but in a suitably furnished dining room. They no longer entertained visitors in their bedchambers but in a salon; gentlemen had their studies, ladies had boudoirs—part dressing room, part sitting room—where special intimates could be received. All of these rooms were smaller, less grand, and more intimate than in the past. They were no longer arranged enfilade in long rows, but in a more casual way, so that one room could be reached without crossing another. This separation of the house into public and private areas was reflected by a change in the language. The place where one slept was no longer called simply a “room”—it was now referred to as a “chamber.”

Today, when servants have become a luxury (at least in North America), they are ostentatiously displayed. This was not the case in the eighteenth century, when inquisitive, gossiping servants began to be considered an intrusion on the privacy of their masters. Louis XV’s hunting lodge at Choisy contained a mechanism that enabled a fully set table to be elevated into the dining room from the kitchen below, eliminating the need for servants and permitting the king and his friends to enjoy complete intimacy. It was the custom in Versailles for the servants to be dismissed and for the king himself to serve his guests after supper-parties when the company retreated into the salon for coffee.

A desire for greater privacy characterized the eighteenth century; it was found in the bourgeois home no less than in the palace. Since the Middle Ages, servants had either slept in the same rooms as their; masters or in an adjoining room. They were summoned by clapping the hands, or ringing asmall hand bell. In the eighteenth century the hand bell was replaced by the bell cord. This device operated a complex system of wires and pulleys and rang a bell in another part of the house. It was invented because the new sense of family privacy demanded that servants be kept at a distance.

Other rooms included private bedchambers, often a boudoir, and several smaller rooms which were used for storage and for servants. It would be a mistake not to mention the appearance of these rooms, decorated in a style which originated in France and which came to be known as Rococo.* Rococo architects were fond of decoration in the form of shells, foliage, and extravagant scrollwork, all of it usually finished in gilt. Everything that could be decorated was. Although it was executed with extreme skill and delicacy, the overall effect of that much ornamentation could be overwhelming. Rococo features were almost never found on the exteriors of French buildings (although they did appear, later, in Italy and Spain). Rococo was the first style to be developed exclusively for the interior as opposed to the exterior. This underlined not only that the insides of houses were being thought of as very different from the outsides, but also that an important distinction was being made between interior decoration and architectureThis distinction was not as obvious then as it now seems; previously, the architecture of rooms had been the architecture of facades, turned inside out. It was not until the Rococo that architects such as Blondel could specialize in “interior decoration.”

Like his contemporaries, Blondel used the word “commodity” to imply convenience and suitability to human use, and he differentiated it from the purely aesthetic (“delight”), or that which was required by structural necessity (“firmness”). It also meant “comfort,” but it did so in a very particular way. According to Blondel, the correct way to plan a house was to divide the rooms into three categories: ceremonial rooms {appartements de parade), formal reception rooms {appartements de societe) and a third category that he called appartements de commodite. “In a large building, the appartements de commodites consist of rooms which, unlike the others, are rarely open to strangers, and are intended for the private use of the master or mistress of the house.

Was the search for commodity a pagan escape from the medieval religiosity that had for so long dominated domestic furnishings? J. H. B. Peel suggested that the eighteenth century’s preoccupation with physical comfort was a result of the decline in religious faith, or at any rate of the abatement in religious fervor,It is certainly hard to imagine a society more materialistic than that of Louis XV, but it was a complex society, full of contradictions (like all societies) and difficult for us to understand. It was a society that prayed and played. Its pursuit of pleasure impelled it toward the sometimes outrageous luxury of the Rococo, but it also, at the same time, led it to discover comfort.

The eighteenth century discovered physical comfort, there is no doubt of that, but convenience never dominated its thinking, as it sometimes seems to do our own. Perhaps that is why the word “commodity” is not the first that springs to mind when describing a Louis XV chair—elegance, delight, yes, certainly beauty, but not prosaic comfort. Yet comfortable is precisely what it was.

The continued attractiveness of the Georgian interior is no accident of fashion. It typified a period that combined domesticity, elegance, and comfort more successfully than ever before, or, many have argued, since. The idea of comfort did not enter the European consciousness fully formed; it developed over a long period of time, and although it made great progress in Rococo France its evolution did not end there. From about the middle of the eighteenth century, or slightly earlier, it came increasingly under the influence of Georgian England. Here, thanks to a happy confluence of economic and social conditions and national character, it flowered.

French social life was focused on Versailles and adjacent Paris. England was different. For one thing, the Court of St. James’s had little influence over society’s behavior. The Hanoverian George II (who could at least speak English, unlike his father, George I, who spoke only German) was an unimaginative monarch who never acquired the prestige of Louis XV. Although he did manage to entice Handel to London from Hanover, his court, unlike Versailles, was a lackluster place. The English aristocracy, moreover, were much more powerful, and independent, than their French counterparts. They were landed gentry whose wealth, and whose pride, were their rural properties. There was, then, no equivalent in England to the French courtly style; instead the countryside was held in high regard, and it was not considered provincial to live there. Out of this state of affairs emerged a singular phenomenon, the English country house, which supplemented, if it did not replace, the city as the locus for social life. This prompted the American ambassador to remark: “Scarcely any persons who hold a leading place in the circles of their society live in London. They have houses in London, in which they stay while Parliament sits, and occasionally visit at other seasons; but their homes are in the country.”' This preference for the country home had architectural repercussions. The plan and arrangement of the English townhouse, which was usually part of a row (unlike the Parisian hotels which was freestanding), had been standardized before the end of the seventeenth century, and it changed little for the next 150 years. Country houses, on the other hand, exhibited much variety, and it was to their planning and design that owners and their architects gave the most attention.

The first appearance of comfort in France had been in an aristocratic setting, and to that extent it was always constrained by its surroundings. If it is true that Rococo furniture introduced informality to the palace, it nevertheless never shed its courtly origins; even today, a room full of Louis XV furniture cannot, for better or worse, avoid looking regal. But when the idea of comfort was transplanted to England it assumed a different demeanor. It is revealing that after the seventeenth century, the English less and less referred to their homes, however grand, as anything but “houses”—there was no special word such as “chateau,” “palazzo,” or even “villa” to distinguish the large from the small, the grand from the merely mundane. To the English they were all houses. This domestication of comfort was facilitated by the struc¬ ture of English society, in which wealth was slightly more equally distributed than in France. The difference between the nobility and the wealthy middle class was less strictly observed; a “gentleman” could belong to either group; the important thing was how he behaved. While this did not quite make for a situation akin to that of the seventeenth-century Dutch republic, it was one in which bourgeois practicality exerted a major influence on domestic comfort.

The prosperity of Georgian England allowed a great deal more leisure than before, and the English bourgeois, unlike the Dutch, took advantage of the opportunity. How did they use this free time? The British eighteenth century was almost completely uninterested in strenuous athletics. Except for riding and cricket, physical sports were rare. Sometimes, in the winter, young people went skating, a pastime that had been introduced from Holland in the previous century. The benefits of “sea air” were starting to be appreciated, but people went to the beach to walk, not to bathe, and swimming did not become popular in England until the late 1800s. Indeed, none of the traditional bourgeois sports appeared until the nine teenth century. Croquet came to England from France in the 1850s, at about the same time as golf and bowling were introduced from Scotland; lawn tennis began to be played, at Wimbledon, around 1874. Even the bicycle, which did so much to transform the leisure of the middle class—especially of women—did not achieve commercial success until the 1880s.

Consequently, the sedentary eighteenth-century English bourgeois spent most of their time at home. Those who lived in the country—without the theaters, concerts, and balls of the city—visited each other. It was the age of conversation—and of gossip. The novel became popular. So did indoor games; men played billiards, women embroidered, and together they played cards They organized dances, dinner parties, and amateur theatricals. They turned tee from a Dutch word (and a foreign beverage; it was also known as China drink), into a national ritual. They went on placid walks and admired one of their great accomplishments, the English garden. Since all these activities took place in and around the house, the result was that the home acquired a position of social importance that it had never had before, or since. No longer a place of work as it had been in the Middle Ages, the home became a place of leisure.

The home was a social place, but it was so in a curiously private way. The English bourgeois house was an isolated world into which only the well-screened visitor was permitted; the world was kept at bay, and the privacy of the family, and of the individual, was disturbed as little as possible. There were “at home days” and “morning calls” (which were in the afternoon). Domestic etiquette was based, above all, on reticence; next-door neighbors exchanged notes—which were delivered by a servant—in order to avoid an unannounced visit. It was impolite to drop in uninvited, even on your close friends. If a visit was planned, it was necessary to leave one’s “visiting card” and await a reply.

Now that children were spending most of their time in the home, they had not only their own bedrooms—separated according to gender—but also accompanying nurseries and schoolrooms. The multi¬ plication of bedrooms indicated not only new sleeping arrangements, but a novel distinction between the family and the individual. Activities in the home were separated vertically; public below, private above. “Going upstairs” or “coming downstairs” meant not just changing floors but leaving, or joining, the company of others. Everyone had his own bedroom. These bedrooms were not simply rooms for sleeping, however; children used their rooms for play, wives and daughters used their bedrooms for quiet work (sewing or writing) or for intimate tete-d-tetes with friends. The desire for a room of one’s own was not simply a matter of personal privacy. It demonstrated the growing awareness of individ-uality—of a growing personal inner life—and the need to express this individuality in physical ways.

The interior of the house was also affected. No longer a compact mass, the house was developing long wings. These required corridors for movement and inevitably produced a greater measure of privacy for the individual rooms. Since the arrangement of the rooms was no longer constrained by geometry, it became easier to combine rooms of different sizes and to dimension and proportion them according to need The freer planning made it easier to incorporate new types of rooms. Windows could be located and proportioned according to the function of the room, instead of according to the requirements of facade composition. As a result, the room, which up until the Rococo period had been considered as an artifact, if not as a work of art, began to be seen as a locus for human activity; it was no longer only a beautiful space, but was becoming a place.

More important than the adoption of a specific style, however, was the assimilation of a way of thinking about the home, which was to have a decisive influence on future American developments. There is something extremely appealing about the Georgian interior. It reflected a sensibility which, as Praz put it, reconciled bourgeois practicality with fantasy, and common sense with refinement. It is this potent combination, perhaps, that accounts for the continued attraction of the Georgian interior: the idea that comfort should include not only visual delight and physical well-being, but also usefulness. This was the French idea of commodity carried one step further; the down-to-earth notion of comfort was no longer a simple idea, it had become an ideal. It is surprising how often one comes across the words “comfort” and “comfortable” in Jane Austen’s novels. She used them in the old sense of support or assistance, but more frequently she intended them to convey a new kind of experience—the sense of contentment brought about by the enjoyment of one’s physical surroundings. She described Fanny’s room as a “nest of comforts.” There were not only comfortable rooms and comfortable carriages, but comfortable meals, comfortable views, and comfortable situations. It was as if she couldn’t get enough of it—this new, undramatic word which was so well-suited to the bourgeois coziness of the world she described. In one of her last novels, Emma, she used the expression “English comfort” and did not elaborate on this curious phrase, which makes one think its meaning must have been evident to her readers. She used it to describe not a house, but a country view: a short avenue of limes leading to the end of the garden and a stone wall; beyond the stone wall a steep slope of meadows and some farm buildings, enclosed by the bend of a river. “It was a sweet view—sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a bright sun, without being oppressive.” Comfort was meant to be undramatic and calming. It was to appear “natural” but, like the English garden, or the English home, it was carefully contrived.

The truth was that although people in the eighteenth century frequently referred to “utility” and “convenience” in speaking about their homes these terms had as much to do with good taste and fashion, as with functional efficiency. That is they could speak of a “comfortable view” as easily as of a “comfortable chair.” Comfort was a generalized feeling of well-being, not something that could be studied or quantified. So ingrained was this attitude that fifty years after Jane Austen’s death the idea of “English comfort” still held sway. “What we would call in England a comfortable house is a thing so intimately identified with English customs as to make us apt to say that in no other country but our own is this element of comfort fully understood.” Americans would have hardly been expected to agree with this claim, but until at least the 1850s comfort was seen by most people as something first of all cultural (and arguably English), and only secondarily something physical.

It comes as something of a surprise to recall that the stodgy Victorian figures in early photographs, stiff and unrelaxed in their wing collars and corseted dresses, buried in rooms overladen with dark draperies and filled with overstuffed furniture, were also addicted to the outdoors. After all, they popularized bicycle riding, sports, and gymnastics, as well as seaside holidays. Theirs was not the Georgian sybaritic enjoyment of nature; the Victorians exercised for health — moral as well as physical. They seem to have authentically enjoyed the bracing feeling of the outdoors, even inside their homes. It is a habit that the British have persisted in following, much to the dismay of American visitors.

Ventilation involved more than getting rid of unpleasant odors, however. Characteristically, the nineteenth century had approached the problem of air in a scientific way. Since the eighteenth century, it was known that air consisted of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide, or carbonic acid as it was called. Practical experience showed that a crowded room eventually became stuffy and unpleasant. Experimentation established that as people breathed air they produced carbon dioxide, and scientists reasoned that it was the increased level of carbon dioxide in a room which affected the comfort of its inhabitants. The solution, or so it seemed at the time, was simple: reduce carbon dioxide levels by evacuating the stale air and introducing fresh air in its place. We now know that this theory was wrong, although the philosophy wasn’t. Human comfort is not simply a function of the carbon dioxide level. Temperature, water vapor content, air movement, ionization, dust, and odors are equal, if not more important, factors. If the air in a room is too hot or cold, or too humid or dry, or too still, and if it contains dust or smells, discomfort will occur long before unhealthy carbon dioxide levels are reached. The complexity of the factors influencing atmospheric comfort did not become apparent until the early 1900s; before then ventilation was seen only in terms of diluting carbon dioxide. For that reason its effect was exaggerated. , Douglas Gabon, a British engineer, recommended that fifty cubic feet of fresh air per minute per person was needed to properly ventilate a room. W. H. Corfield, an English physician, cited the same figure.Dr. John S. Billings, an army doctor, mentions sixty cubic feet per minute per occupant in a contemporaneous American publication. These figures should be compared to current ventilation standards, which consider that between five and fifteen cubic feet per minute per person is adequate, and may even be excessive, depending on how well humidity, heat, and the other factors are controlled.

The emphasis on ventilation had an important influence on domestic comfort. Although Gabon and Billings were mistaken about the actual amount of air required — an error that would be realized soon enough—they did identify a real problem. Their research introduced people to the idea that domestic comfort was something that could be studied, measured, and explained.

The arrival of gaslight and ventilation, flawed as these technologies were, signified the beginning of the rationalization, and moreover the mechanization, of the home. Domestic technology such as the gasolier and the ventilation duct represented an invasion of the home, not only by new devices, but by a different sensibility — that of the engineer and of the businessman. This was an invasion that most architects (though not their clients) chose to ignore.

In the 1871 edition of his influential book The Gentleman’s House, the architect Robert Kerr did not feel it necessary to discuss gaslight, except to laconically instruct the reader that “the architect’s province need go no further than to accommodate the gas-engineer according to his demands.” Henry Rutton was a Canadian engineer who had designed ventilating systems for railroad cars in Canada and the United States. In 1860 he published a book detailing how many of his ideas (double glazing, for example) could be applied to house construction. Rutton was critical of architects: “Amid the blaze of light which in this nineteenth century has so illumined the world, architecture alone lies motionless, covered with the dust of ages. Not a single new idea, so far as I know, has been suggested by the profession within the memory of man.”

The lack of interest of most architects in new technologies marks a watershed in the evolution of domestic comfort. When technological advances were introduced, they seem to have been due to the interest of the client rather than of the architect. With the introduction of devices such as the gasolier and the vent duct a rift appeared between the mainly visual approach of decorators and the primarily mechanical approach of the engineers. As we shall see. with time this rift widened and contributed to a schizophrenic attitude toward domestic comfort that still troubles us.

For a variety of reasons—some social, some economic—the American woman (like her seventeenth-century Dutch counterpart) did all or at least a good part of her own housework. This meant that at the same time as electricity and mechanization were entering the home, many middleclass women were in a position to appreciate, at first hand, the benefits of labor-saving devices and improvements to domestic work, and had the disposable income to buy them. The coincidence of these factors explains the rapidity with which the American home altered in the early 1900s.

The great American innovation in the home was to demand comfort not only in domestic leisure, but also in domestic work.

Giedion makes the point that the organization of work in the home was well under way before mechanized tools became available. He should have added “in America,” for the introduction of efficiency and comfort into housework occurred first in that country. The earliest exponent of what would come to be called home economics was Catherine E. Beecher, who wrote A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School in 1841. Although it was concerned primarily with managing the household, this textbook also included a chapter “On the onstruction of Houses.” Like her English contemporary Robert Kerr in The Gentleman’s House, Beecher emphasized the importance of health, convenience, and comfort in house planning, although she placed a good deal less emphasis on “good taste,” holding it to be “a desirable, though less important, item.” Unlike The Englishman’s House, or any of the many books on domestic architecture, Beecher’s Treatise was addressed to women, not to men, and because she was dealing with the principal user of the house she addressed a different set of issues. She dealt not with “finical ornaments” and fashion, but with adequate closet space and comfortable kitchens; not with how the house looked, but with how it functioned.

In the Treatise and in later books she elaborated her ideas in architectural and technical detail. Her different point of view was evident throughout. Other architectural books depicted the kitchen as simply a large room labeled “Kitchen.” She indicated not only the location of the major components such as the sink and the stove, but also a variety of other practical innovations: drawers for towels and scouring powder beneath the sink, a continuous work surface with storage below and shelves above, the cookstove separated from the other work area by sliding glazed doors. Nor did she confine herself to the kitchen. To save space, she placed the beds in little alcoves (these were called “bedpresses” and resembled the Dutch sleeping cupboards of the seventeenth century) which were distributed throughout the house, even in the parlor and dining room. Although architectural books of that time generally omitted showing the direction of door swings, she carefully included them because “the comfort of a fireside very much depends on the way in which the doors are hung.

The masculine idea of the home was primarily sedentary—the home as a retreat from the cares of the world, a place to be at ease. The feminine idea of the home was dynamic; it had to do with ease, but also with work. It could be said to have shifted the focus from the drawing room to the kitchen, which was why, when electricity entered the home, it was by the kitchen door.

Much has been written about the environmental technology that was incorporated into the model house described in Beecher’s The American Woman’s Home, which she wrote together with her sister Harriet in 1869. It included a ducted system of heating and ventilation which supplied hot air from a basement furnace to every room and did away with fireplaces altogether. Pressurized water was fed by a cistern under the roof; there were two water closets, one in the basement and one on the bedroom floor. What was equally remarkable about the house was the way that it made use of space. What would normally have been a dining room contained a large movable closet on rollers. At night, the closet was moved to one side and the room served as a bedroom. In the morning, the room could be divided in two and used as a sitting room and a breakfast room, while during the day the closet was used to create a small sewing area and a larger parlor. In this way, “small and economical houses can be made to secure most of the comforts and many of the refinements of large and expensive ones,” wrote the Beecher sisters. The house plans Catherine Beecher included in her Treatise, which were intended for “young house keepers” in “moderate circumstances,” were indeed small. In one example, by resorting to bedpresses and small bed¬ rooms, she managed to provide space for eight persons in less than twelve hundred square feet, not ignoring generous closets and storage space. “Every room in a house adds to the expense involved in finishing and furnishing it, and to the amount of labor spent in sweeping, dusting, cleaning floors, paint, and windows, and taking care of, and repairing its furniture. Double the size of a house, and you double the labor of taking care of it, and so, vice versa.”

Beecher’s obsession with reducing the size of the house was not simply a question ofsaving money—though a small house always costs less to build than a large one. She was suggesting something different: that a small house, because it was easier to take care of and use, could be more comfortable than a larger one. The disadvantage of a large house, she wrote, was that “the table furniture, the cooking materials and utensils, the sink, and the eating-room, are at such distances apart, that half the time and strength is employed in walking back and forth to collect and return the articles used.” This appreciation for smallness was something that had disappeared from the domestic scene since the snug Dutch home. Its reappearance marked an important moment in the evolution of domestic comfort. In this, as in so many things, Beecher was ahead of her time, for the nineteenth century still associated comfort with spaciousness, and the idea of living in a reduced area would have been difficult for for most people to accept. But it was only a question of time.

The idea of locating the water closet and bathtub together in a single room, for the common use of all the family, was an American one. By the turn of the century the compact three-fixture bathroom, with the tub placed across the end of the room and the water closet and sink side by side, was commonplace. This was not the case in Europe. The “American” bathroom was an important device in planning a small house, since it meant that the dressing rooms could be dispensed with altogether, and the bedrooms (in which the bathtub had sometimes been placed) could be made smaller. Comfort was also affected; not for the bather (what could be more pleasant than lounging in a bath in front of a cheery fire?) but for the person who had previously to fill and empty the tub, not just for one, but for each of the bedrooms. The modern bathroom with its engineered plumbing fixtures and tiled walls looked efficient and functional, but it evolved as a result of the servantless household, not of any major technical advance.

So many aspects of the modern home that we take for granted date from this period—the small size of the house, the correct height for work counters, the placement of major appliances to save needless steps, the organization of storage. Anyone who works comfortably at the kitchen counter, or takes dishes out of a dishwasher and places them in a convenient overhead shelf, or dusts the house in an hour, not a day, owes something to the domestic engineers.

The difficulties of adapting historical styles to small homes were not limited to decor The symmetry of a neo-Classical floor plan was a constraint in arranging a small house, even in the hands of the most skillful architect. If there were not enough rooms, the required spatial effect was lost; and if the rooms themselves were irregularly shaped and designed for efficiency rather than effect, it might be impossible to combine them in the correct classical manner. The formality of Georgian planning was also ill suited to the more relaxed way of life that was being adopted. What was needed was a more intimate domestic style. The seventeenth-century Dutch had built small houses that were both cozy and comfortable, and a “Dutch revival,” had one occurred, would have offered one solution. In the event, the development of the small, efficient servantless home was made easier by the appearance, in 1870, of a different, but not unrelated, eighteenth-century style Queen Anne.

The originator of the Queen Anne style and one of its most vocal proponents was the same J. J. Stevenson who wrote that practical guide House Architecture. Stevenson felt that neither the neo-Gothic nor the neo-Greek and neo-Roman styles were particularly suitable for homes; what he was looking for was a more domestic approach. He based his designs, very loosely, on seventeenth-century English domestic architecture. His houses were typically built out of unplastered red brick, and the facades incorporated little or no applied classical detail. They were far from plain, however, for the exterior consisted of varied fenestration, dormers, chimneys, metalwork, shutters, and bay windows, disposed in an irregular way with no attempt at symmetry. Stevenson called his style “Free Classic.” This name never caught on; instead, it became known as “Queen Anne” (Queen Anne ruled from 1702 to 1714) a not very historical appellation, but then it was not a very historically accurate style. Therein lay its appeal; the words most often used to describe Queen Anne homes are “charming” and “picturesque,” attributes that quickly endeared it to the general public.

The intention of a Queen Anne interior was to produce a picturesque effect, which was done by mixing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century furniture in as “artistic” a way as possible. In that sense a Queen Anne room exhibited “a harmony less of style than of treatment.”^ While this usually produced a crowded interior, it did have the virtue of allowing a much greater degree of freedom to the householder than the more restrictive historical styles. The other advantage lay in planning. Since irregularity was admired, rooms could be planned according to the activities that they contained, they could assume different shapes and sizes and be combined in different ways, and the heights of their ceilings could vary. The use of fireside inglenooks, window seats, and alcoves enhanced the cozy and informal atmosphere. This is not to say that Queen Anne was by any means a functional style—its aspirations were primarily visual—but it unintentionally made it much easier to plan smaller and more convenient homes. Equally fortuitously, since the main architectural feature of a Queen Anne house was a multitude of whitepainted, small-paned windows, interiors tended to be brighter than in the past.

We have arrived—very nearly—at the modern home. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the story of comfort is one of a gradual evolution. It was an evolution that was undisturbed even by the arrival of electricity and household management. It managed to survive the disappearance of servants, and the reappearance of the small family home. It was resilient enough to absorb not only new technology, but also a new way of life. But this easy balance between innovation and tradition was about to be upset by a rupture in the evolution of domestic comfort which would drastically alter the appearance of the domestic interior.

Art Deco was the final in a line of creative styles, each less historical than the last. The Arts and Crafts movement in England had begun by developing the so-called English Cottage style, which, like Queen Anne, was based on earlier domestic architecture, but was freer and more original in its interior decoration. This led to the even more creative Art Nouveau style Although there were precedents for Art Nouveau, both in England and America, it emerged first in Brussels, a well-defined, creative style, uninfluenced by history. During its short life—it lasted less than a decade, from 1892 to 1900—it spread over Europe, where it was known by a variety of names: Jugendstil, Liberty, il stile floreale, and Modern Style. It was first and foremost an interior style, and Art Nouveau rooms were characterized by sinuous ornament based on forms drawn from nature, by an absence of clutter, and by the stylistic consistency of the furniture, fabrics, and carpets. The reasons for its rapid demise are unclear. Perhaps people tired of its extravagance, perhaps it was so perfect and fully formed that it could not develop further, or perhaps its “breath of decadence” (Praz’s phrase) doomed it from the beginning. In any case, it encouraged further experimentation, and closed the door, or so it seemed, on period decor in its final variation in Vienna, where it was known as the Secession style, it shed much of its floral character, and thanks to designers like Josef Hoffmann it acquired a more abstract, and geometrical, appearance.

Art Deco came to the attention of the general public at the International Exposition, but this French style had its beginning earlier. It was triggered by the arrival in Paris of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1909. The music of Rimsky, Korsakov and the dancing of Nijinsky had an electrifying effect on Parisian society, but the sensuous decor and costumes of Leon Bakst made as great an impression. They were exotic and flamboyant, and a radical departure from what people were used to. After seeing the ballet Sheherazade, leading couturiers like Paul Poiret introduced feathered turbans, colored silk stockings, harem pants, and other oriental fashions. The new look, glamorous and sexy, was an enormous success. The full curves of the Belle Epoque were replaced by slim layered skirts, and corsets were replaced by straight cocktail dresses (eventually quite short) and small bosoms. As had happened so often in the past, clothing influenced decor. Gold lame needed an appropriate setting—neither the quaint Cottage style nor the strict Viennese Secession would do.

After the First World War, in the heady atmosphere of the Twenties, Art Deco flourished and became the predominant Parisian style. It had always had a whiff of sinfulness, which now, if anything, increased. It continued to be influenced by dance, but now it was by the cabaret revues of Josephine Baker, by the sultry tango, and the Black Bottom. Art Deco apartments—it was always an urban style, hence its glossy toughness—incorporated African influences with zebra and leopard skins and tropical woods.

By 1925, it was pretty much taken for granted, at least in France, that comfortable interiors could be designed without any specific reference to the past. The organizers of the International Exposition had explicitly insisted that there should not be any period interiors at all—everything was to be “new and modern.” More than any style of that time. Art Deco showed an aesthetic appreciation for modern materials and devices; for these designers technology was fun.

Although a few critics muttered about “this frank appeal to the class of privilege,” most people, including most of the public, accepted the wealthy style on its own terms. The war to end all wars had been fought and forgotten, postwar prosperity was in full swing, and the jazz-modern style seemed just right. The consensus was that the Paris exhibition was a great success. The “modernest of modern” styles was sometimes strange, often exotic, but all agreed it was the coming thing.

The most controversial building at the Exposition was undoubtedly the Soviet pavilion. It was designed in the Constructivist manner that was then favored by the new revolutionary state, and its stark. plain, geometrical appearance, of unpainted wood, shocked many, as it was intended to do. The (apocryphal) story was that when the pavilion was being erected on the Exposition site, the packing crates in which it had arrived from Russia had been incorporated in the building by mistake.

Some distance from the Soviet pavilion was a site that had been entrusted to one of the innumerable small art magazines then being published in Paris. The pavilion was called Esprit Nouveau (New Spirit)—that was the name of the magazine - and it was probably what an American correspondent had in mind when he complained about certain designs that exhibited the “prosaic literalness of a cold storage warehouse cube.” That was not altogether unfair for it was roughly box-shaped, and its plain exterior was white, relieved only by enormous, twenty-foot-high letters painted on one wall - EN. The official encyclopedia of the Exposition called it an “oddity,” and assured the reader that despite its strange appearance, it was not something from another planet. As for the public, it seems to have been largely uninterested. The “strange Slavonic conceptions” of the Russian pavilion attracted attention, but few of the visitors that hurried by spared the New Spirit house a glance. None of the extensive articles on the Exposition that appeared in the American and English architectural press mentioned it by name. Yet this building, not even worth criticizing, was to prove more influential in the development of the home than any of its lauded and illustrious neighbors.

The pavilion had been designed by the Jeanneret cousins, Charles-Edouard and Pierre. The former, who was the editor of L’Esprit Nouveau, was to become better known by his recently assumed nom de plume, Le Corbusier. Visitors to the pavilion would have found the interior as bare and unfinished as the exterior. There were no ornaments, no draperies, no wallpaper. There was no mantelpiece to display the family photographs, no paneling in the study. There was no polished wood, let alone lapis lazuli. The color scheme was stark: predominantly white walls contrasted with a blue ceiling; one wall of the living room was painted brown; the storage cabinets that served as room dividers were painted bright yellow. The effect was distinctly unhomey, and was heightened by the staircase, which was made out of steel pipes and looked as if it had been plucked directly from a ship’s boiler room. The industrial atmosphere was echoed in the window frames, which were not wood, but steel, of a type commonly known as factory sash. There were some strange transpositions—the kitchen was the smallest room in the house, the size of a bathroom, and the bathroom, which was intended to double as an exercise room and had one entire wall built out of glass blocks, was almost as big as the living room. Even more surprising was the furniture. Not only was there little of it, it seemed intentionally lackluster: a couple of non descript leather armchairs, side chairs of a common variety usually found in popular restaurants, and tables consisting of slabs of plain wood mounted on tubular steel frames. Compared to the syncopations of jazz-modern, the New Spirit was a one-note tune played on a penny whistle.

What did the New Spirit consist of? First, the complete rejection of decorative art. This meant, obviously, the rejection of the ornament that characterized the historical revival styles, which Le Corbusier scornfully called Louis A, B, and C. But it also meant rejecting such creative revivals as Arts and Crafts and the Secession style, and avoiding even the abstract decoration of Art Deco. That would leave the interior rather bare, wouldn’t it? And what was wrong with that? asked Le Corbusier. You could always hang a painting on the wall. In fact, the pavilion contained works by several avant-garde Parisian artists—Picasso, Gris and Lipschitz. But what about furnishings? Although Le Corbusier deplored the bourgeois habit of collecting furniture—he derided their homes as “labyrinths of furniture”—he had to admit that some pieces—tables and chairs—were necessary. But he had the answer to that as well: New Spirit homes would no longer contain furniture, instead they would be furnished with equip-ment. “Decorative art is equipment,” he wrote, “beautiful equipment.”

Lacking enough funds, and time, to design original pieces, Le Corbusier was obliged to use ready-made furniture. He could have used any variety of inexpensive, mass-produced domestic furniture that was available, but he chose instead to use bentwood restaurant chairs inside and common cast-iron Parisian park furniture on the terrace. Laboratory jars served as flower vases; cheap bistro glasses replaced cut crystal. Instead of chandeliers or decorative lighting fixtures there were spotlights, wallmounted shop-window lamps, or bare bulbs.

To most visitors, the pipe railings and restaurant furniture appeared crude and makeshift. To them there was nothing attractive about cheap bistro glasses or industrial lighting fixtures. The blank white walls were uninviting and bare, the harsh colors and the factory-made objects seemed cold and impersonal. The tall living room with its enormous window resembled a workshop or an artist’s studio, its Spartan furnishings and hard bright finishes more suited to a common commercial establishment than to a home. The cramped kitchen had all the charm of a tiny laboratory. In an exhibition devoted to the decorative arts, Le Corbusier’s pavilion contained neither decoration nor, it seemed to most, artistry.

Was the reason for these drastic changes, as Le Corbusier claimed, the requirements of a “new mechanical age”? In “The Manual of the Dwelling,” published two years before, Le Corbusier had offered advice to the prospective homeowner. Heating was not mentioned. Ventilation was hardly touched on. He offered nothing more mechanical than openable windows in every room. His proposal that the kitchen be at the top of the house to avoid smells was quaint—and impractical. As for domestic appliances, the best he could do was suggest a vacuum cleaner and a gramophone—hardly revolutionary devices. The pavilion demonstrated little interest in such technical details as the convenient location of electric outlets and lamps. “The house is a machine for living in” was one of his most famous sayings, but judged from a purely mechanical perspective the New Spirit offered little that was—well, new.

Yet one cannot help sympathizing with Le Corbusier’s efforts to come to grips with the problems of modern living, something that set his plain pavilion apart from the sumptuous interiors of the Art Deco ensembliers. He was trying, however awkwardly, to make the home a more efficient place, and to deal with everyday life, instead of with the esoteric, almost outdated problems of decor.

But there was a telling difference in their choice of metaphors: clothing and machinery. The aim of scientific management in the factory was to discover efficient and standardized work procedures. When they applied these theories to the home, the domestic engineers realized that they were dealing with activities that were more complex, and more personal. They also recognized that there was more than one “correct” way of doing things, and their aim was to help people discover solutions that would suit their individual needs—that was why Richards imagined the house as clothing, which should be fitted to the individual. Lillian Gilbreth’s flow process charts and micro-motion transfer sheets were intended to enable the housewife to organize the home according to her own work habits. She continually reminded her readers that there was no ideal solution; the height of a kitchen counter must be adjusted to the height of the person, and the most useful layout of appliances would vary from one household to the next. Her first two rules for improving the layout of the home were “Be guided by convenience, not convention” and “Consider the personalities and habits of your family, yourself included.”

When Gilbreth referred to “standards” she meant the per¬ sonal norms that each family decided for itself; once these were established, the technique of scientific management could be applied to find the most efficient way of achieving them. For Le Corbusier, on the other hand, standards were something that was imposed from without. According to him, human needs were universal and could be uniformalized, and consequently his solutions were prototypical, not personal. He visualized the home as a mass-produced object (a typewriter), to which the individual should adapt. The job of the designer was to identify the “correct” solution; once it was found, it was up to people to accustom themselves to it. For Le Corbusier, the ideal furniture was office furniture, which, like the typewriter, was based on “prototypes” and which through mass production, was repeated on a large scale. In a book he published just after the International Exposition he illustrated this by showing an exemplary interior—the City-National Bank in Tuscaloosa, of all places—in which desks and office chairs with identical fans, telephones, lamps — and typewriters — are neatly lined up one behind the other.

The idea of standardization, useful though it might be in banks, is ill suited to the complicated and varied activities that are contained by the home. Because of this, Le Corbusier’s ideas about domestic planning were less sophisticated than those of the domestic engineers. The cramped kitchen in the New Spirit house, with its minimal counter space, was poorly conceived, its relation to the dining room inconvenient. The open study would have been noisy and impractical. The one room which could have benefited from standardization, the bathroom, was treated sculpturally, to little benefit. Not only was Le Corbusier’s design not a “servantless house,” it was not even, despite his admiration for efficiency, particularly small. In addition to the large outdoor terrace, the three-bedroom home had an area of 2,500 square feet. This was more than twice as big as Catherine Beecher’s model house, and much larger than Von Holst’s “efficient home,” which had included a family room, four bedrooms, and two porches, and which had been designed fifteen years before.

Another difference between Le Corbusier and the domestic engineers concerned the question of what the efficient home should look like. Richards’s, Frederick’s, and Gilbreth’s attitude to the appearance of the home can only be described as cheerfully pragmatic; they were concerned with function, not appearance. This was where Le Corbusier parted company with the domestic engineers. He was still, in a sense, a nineteenth century architect, fighting the battle of the styles. That was what the New Spirit was all about—a new style, a style suited to the twentieth century, a style for the Machine Age, a style for more efficient living. His was not simply a modern home, but a home that looked modern. Like most architects, Le Corbusier did not understand, or would not accept, that the advent of domestic technology and home management had put the whole question of architectural style in a subordinate position.

The Laurens’ duplex is what designers call “deceptively simple.” In other words, it doesn’t look decorated at all. The man who wants to house America in tattersalls, foulards, and chambray has chosen something much more fashionable for himself—Minimal decor. According to the strict rules of this genre, not only are all decorative architectural elements stripped away, but all personal possesions are made invisible as well. The lights are hidden in the ceiling, books and children’s toys are hidden in the cupboards, even the cupboards are hidden behind smooth, usually mat-white, doors. Dining rooms resemble monastic refectories. Kitchens look as bare as the other rooms—refrigerator, oven, pots and pans, spoons and spatulas are out ofsight. In one extreme case of Minimal design—the flat of an art dealer in London—even the beds are hidden, for they consist of cotton futons that are rolled up and put away during the day. In the same home the bathroom is so pristine that it is not provided with shelves or cabinets—the owner is obliged to carry the toothbrush and soap with her in what she calls a “wet-pack.” If this sounds awkward, we are assured that she “cheerfully insists that the minor incon veniences of her disciplined way of living are worth putting up with for the sake of a highly refined way of life.

How fashion has changed. In 1912, when the great Paris couturier Jacques Doucet sold his collection of eighteenthcentury art and replaced it with Cubist and Surrealist paint¬ ings, he commissioned Paul Iribe to design an appropriately up-to-date decor. The glamorous result—Iribe later designed movie sets for Cecil B. De Mille—is generally considered to have been the first Art Deco interior. When Ralph Lauren wants glamour, he settles for bare walls and potted plants.

Minimal decor has been facetiously described as “conspicuous austerity.”^ It is like the expensive versions of certain automobiles that can be ordered from the manufacturer without model markings, or like the native costumes worn by Saudi politicians at international conferences. It represents a subtle form of snobbism, which achieves singularity by avoiding the familiar; in the case of interiors, this means decor without decoration. But it is also an example of the current taste for reducing the clutter and crowd of objects in a room. Every period, sometimes even every decade, has its own visual taste, just as it has its own culinary taste. During the 1970s, for example, there was an appreciable shift in American eating away from bland food toward a spicier cuisine—ethnic food such as tart Szechwan and hot Tex-Mex became popular. Today, nouvelle cuisine has replaced Escoffier, and the palate seems ready for a simpler diet. So also in interiors; the number of patterns and objects and the degree of visual richness and diversity in rooms vary.

This process of stripping away, which is so characteristic of modern interiors, began with the Viennese architect Adolf Loos. In 1908, he had written a disputatious essay entitled “Ornament and Crime” which advocated the abolition of all ornament from everyday life, including from architecture and from interior decoration. Loos argued that what had been necessary in the past was no longer appropriate in a modern industrialized world. He equated the urge to ornament with primitivism, and he offered bathroom graffiti and tattoos as examples of what he considered to be deviational decoration. The “crime” of ornament was that it wasted society’s resources, both money and people’s time, on what, in Loos’s opinion, was both unnecessary and archaic.

Loos’s vociferous attack on ornament, which he was later to regret, opened the door to a wholesale questioning of traditional values. Moreover, since he had established a moral basis for this questioning it soon acquired the rhetoric, and the self-assurance, of a crusade. For the French, German, and Dutch avant-garde, the elimination of ornament was just the beginning. They turned Loos’s ideas inside out, and the interiors of their houses became just as white and blank as the exteriors. All vestiges of the past were removed. If ornament was a crime, so was luxury. No more rich materials, no more extravagance, no more frills. It was not long before even bourgeois ease itself came under attack. Wallpaper, paneling, and wainscoting were replaced by unpainted plaster, brick, and concrete. The more austere the better. Walls were undecorated, floors were bare, and lighting was harsh.

Next, the very idea of domesticity itself came under attack. Coziness had to go, the moralists were clear about that. Which was why their interiors, unlike those of Loos, had no snug alcoves or fireside inglenooks. Loos had argued that if something was practical it should be used, no matter how old it was—he frequently had copies made of Windsor chairs for his clients. But for the crusaders, bourgeois furnishings, like bourgeois ornament, were to be avoided. That was why they shunned period furniture and used commercial chairs, or designed furniture that looked like industrial equipment. That was why cupboards were made to look like filing cabinets and stairs like ships’ ladders. The home was being remade in a new image, stripped of its bourgeois traditions and bereft of easeful intimacy and well-established ideas of comfort. The more radical architects were open about it. Extreme measures were required to “prevent us from falling prey to dullness, to habit, and *to comfort*” (emphasis added). It is reasonable to ask how such an unlikely—and on the surface, at least, unpopular—agenda could ever have succeeded. It was the result of a series of accidents, coincidences, and historical forces, none of which could have been foreseen in the summer of 1925, when the New Spirit pavilion stood neglected and ignored, the cheerless harbinger of a future that, apparently, nobody wanted.

To begin with, the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression put a damper on the Art Deco style. Most of the private patrons who had supported the ensembliers in the past could no longer afford to pay for the craftsmanship and the fine materials; those who could preferred to spend their money in more discreet ways. Art Deco did not die out altogether—the interiors of the famous French ocean liner Normandie, launched in 1935, were Art Deco—but it ceased to be a domestic style; it had always in any case been too expensive for most people. It did continue in large buildings, especially those that were required to appeal to the public, and as a decor for restaurants, shops, and hotels it reigned supreme for the next twenty-five years. Most American cities had at least one Art Deco movie theater, whose glamorous atmosphere seemed tailor-made for Hollywood’s products. Cities like Miami Beach and Los Angeles practically adopted Art Deco as a municipal style. But authentic Art Deco was for elegant aesthetes, not for the masses, and in its public transformation it was rarely as refined as it had been in its heyday; it became a coarsened and sanitized version of its original risque self.

The unglamorous warehouse cube style, on the other hand, was well suited to post-Depression sobriety; it was also more adaptable to small budgets and limited resources—all you needed was enough white paint. During the 1920s, the only government to (briefly) endorse the anti-bourgeois style had been that of the Soviet Union—Le Corbusier’s first large commission was in Moscow—for the ideology of the anti-bourgeois crusaders was appealing to revolutionary socialists. Since neo-Classicism was favored by dictators—by both Hitler and Mussolini, and, as it turned out, by Stalin—the austere architecture of the modernists came, by default, to represent antifascism and antitotalitarianism.

The new, socialist postwar governments in England, Germany, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries responded favorably to the left-leaning rhetoric of the Modern school. In the United States, where many of the Modern German architects had sought refuge from the Nazis, the Modern style was similarly well received, not because of its socialist teachings, but because, given its origins, it was considered to be sophisticated and avant-garde.

Its antitotalitarian reputation also helped, and it became a “Free World” style, representing democracy and America in the Cold War. In this role it was not seen as just another architectural style; not only white in appearance, it was morally unblemished as well. It was a break with the past, a past that was increasingly seen as worthless and immoral, at least architecturally speaking. According to this view Art Deco had been lewd, the Victorian revivals were decadent, let-them-eat-cake Rococo was the worst—only white austerity was virtuous. Decoration was bad for the soul; it had to be stripped away. People would feel happier discarding the baggage of period decor. If that was not always easy, or agreeable, it was, at least, like medicine, good for you.

The Wassily armchair, designed by Marcel Breuer in 1925-26, is considered to be a classic. Like Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair of the same period, it exemplifies the ideals of contemporary chair design: it is lightweight, it uses machined materials, and it contains no ornament. It is a structure of bent, chromed-metal tubing, across which unpadded leather is stretched to form the seat, back, and armrests. It looks, as the saying goes, untouched by human hands. Its stark beauty is not derived from decoration, but from the explicit and structurally expressive way the materials are combined—the tubing in compression, the fabric in tension. Like all modern chairs it makes no reference to period furniture; its associations are contemporary, and intentionally everyday. The bent metal pipe recalls a bicycle frame, the hard leather resembles a barber’s razor strop. When it was designed it was unlike any chair that anyone had ever seen—even sixty years later it still looks more like an exercise machine than an armchair. Hence the first reaction to sitting in the Wassily chair is favorable; one is surprised that it is possible to sit at all in this unlikely montage of intersecting pipes and planes.

A well-designed easy chair must accommodate not only relaxed sitting, but also having a drink, reading, conversation, bouncing babies on the knee, dozing, and so on. It must permit the sitter to shift about and adopt a variety of positions. This changing of postures has a social function—socalled body language. It should be possible to lean forward (to express concern) or to recline backward (to indicate pensiveness); one should be able to sit primly (to show respect) or to lounge (to communicate informality or even disrespect). The ability to change positions also has an important physical function. The human body is not designed to stay in one position for extended periods; prolonged immobility adversely affects body tissues, muscles, and joints. Changes of position—crossing the legs, tucking one, or both, up under the body, even hanging a leg over the armrest—shift the weight from one part of the body to another, relieve the pressure and stress, and relax different muscle groups. Even the most perfectly designed seat will soon feel uncomfortable if such movement is restricted—as all airline passengers well know. Engineers call this tendency of the body to change positions motility. Lying motility has been extensively studied, with regard both to sleeping comfort and to hospital beds, in which lack of motility quickly causes bedsores. Sitting motility is less well understood, but there are indications that it is equally important in providing a feeling of comfort.

One way to accommodate motility is for the chair itself to move. This is what a traditional rocking chair does; its main purpose is not to rock continuously, but to permit the sitter to shift positions and to alleviate stresses, both in the legs and in the back. This is why rocking chairs are often prescribed for people with back problems. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, mainly in America, there appeared a variety of furniture in which sitting comfort was achieved not by upholstery and padding as in the past, but by movement—flexing, rolling, tilting, and swiveling. Unlike the rocking chair, however, this moving furniture was mechanical. Today mechanical furniture has become associated with offices and stenographer’s chairs, or with specialized seating such as barber’s and dentist’s chairs, but its origins are domestic. The first tilting and swiveling armchair on casters, which was patented in 1853, was intended for the home. The Victorian family used many “machines for sitting in”: flexible chairs for sewing, adjustable invalid couches, swivel chairs for writing and playing the piano, mechanical rockers and adjustable easy chairs.

Domestic mechanical chairs have never attracted the attention of architects and designers; they scorn the adjustable lounge chair or “La-Z-Boy”—a nineteenth-century survivor—as hopelessly lowbrow. The Wassily chair, like all modern domestic furniture, does not include any mechanical devices which would allow the sitter to adjust it to suit his or her requirements.

Contemporary designers are not interested in variations; they want a brand-new score. They want to develop solutions on their own, without the aid of paradigms, and so their work has come to be judged primarily according to its novelty. This has led to a “cult of originality,” as Allan Greenberg has called it, in which “What’s new?” is more frequently asked than “What’s better?” Hepplewhite and Chippendale had offered dozens of examples of alternative chair designs for any particular model. Each modern chair, on the other hand, is considered to be unique—a new paradigm, but one which should never be copied. An Italian fills a bag with polystyrene pellets—an ingenious idea—and that avenue is closed for good; no designer will touch plastic pellets again. The next breakthrough is awaited—will it be chairs made out of corrugated cardboard, or out of expanded plastic mesh? Since each paradigm “belongs” to its designer, it can never be improved by other furniture makers—one finds less-exensive imitations of famous chairs but these are almost never improvements. Under such circumstances gradual evolution becomes impossible; to adapt someone else’s design is to be accused of a lack of imagination, and to improve one’s own is to admit that it was not perfect in the first place

A well-known British architect James Stirling once described some favorite furniture as follows: “I like [the chairs] in an intellectual way. They aren’t awfully comfortable to sit on, although of course you can sit in them for an hour or so without danger of collapse.” So that is what we can expect, an hour without cardiac arrest? Sitting comfort is no longer the main consideration in judging the worth of a chair; it may now be appreciated intellectually. Or aesthetically. Philip Johnson, a protege of Mies van der Rohe, told his students at Harvard, “I think that comfort is a function of whether you think a chair is good-looking or not.” With characteristic wit, he went on to suggest that people who liked the appearance of the Barcelona chairs in his home would enjoy sitting in them, even though, by his own admission, these are “not very comfortable chairs.”

There is something charmingly naive about this belief in the power of art to overcome physical reality. It is, of course, wishful thinking. The people slumped in a Barcelona chair, or struggling to get out of an Eames lounge chair, do not feel comfortable, they are simply willing to put up with discomfort in the name of art—or prestige—which is not the same thing.

And what does the twentieth-century chair offer us? It shows an optimistic belief in technology and the efficient use of materials. It shows a concern for fabrication, not crafts¬ manship in the traditional sense, but in precise and exact assembly. It is a purposeful object, without frivolity or frills. It offers status; you can buy a used car for less than many modern chairs. It exhibits lightness and movability, and it invites admiration for these qualities—just as a well-made camp cot does. But it does not ask to be sat in, or at least not for long. The Rococo chair invites conversation, and the Victorian chair invites after-dinner naps, but the Modem chair is all business. “Let’s get this sitting over with and get back to something useful,” it commands. It is about many things, this chair, but it is no longer about ease, leisure, or, if truth be told, about comfort.

No one finds this peculiar. But, as Adolf Loos pointed out, such nostalgia is absent from other aspects of our everyday lives. We do not pine for period cuisine. Our concern for health and nutrition has altered the way that we eat, as well as what we eat; our admiration for the slim physique would be puzzling to the corpulent nineteenth century. We have changed our way of speaking, our manners, and our public and private behavior. We do not feel the need to revive the practice of leaving visiting cards, for example, or of indulging in extended, chaperoned courtship. A return to eighteenthcentury decorum would ill suit our informal way of life. Unless we are collectors, we do not drive antique cars. We want automobiles that are less expensive to operate, safer, and more comfortable, but we do not imagine that these improvements can be achieved by resurrecting car models from previous periods. We would feel as odd in a Model T as we would in plus fours or a hooped skirt, yet although we would not think of dressing in period clothes, we find nothing strange in dressing our homes in period decor.

One writer has suggested an explanation for this nostalgia: “Americans may be fascinated with the future, but they don’t want to live in it.” This sounds cogent, but it is inaccurate. For one thing it implies that resistance to innovation in the home is an American tradition, whereas in fact the enormous changes that took place in the home during the end of the nineteenth century and the introduction of efficient home management by the domestic engineers were both largely unopposed. And there has never been any opposition to “futuristic” appliances, whether they are portable phones, Jacuzzi baths, home computers, or big-screen video. For another, the “future” that people seem unwilling to live in—white walls, pipe railings, and steel-and-leather furniture—is hardly shockingly new. The New Spirit is now more than sixty years old, and there has been plenty of time to get used to it.

Nostalgia for the past is often a sign of dissatisfaction with the present. I have called the modern interior “a rupture in the evolution of domestic comfort.” It represents an attempt not so much to introduce a new style—that is the least of it —as to change social habits, and even to alter the underlying cultural meaning of domestic comfort. Its denial of bourgeois traditions has caused it to question, and reject, not only luxury but also ease, not only clutter but also intimacy. Its emphasis on space has caused it to ignore privacy, just as its interest in industrial-looking materials and objects has led it away from domesticity. Austerity, both visual and tactile, has replaced delight. What started as an endeavor to rationalize and simplify has become a wrong-headed crusade; not, as is often claimed, a response to a changing world, but an attempt to change the way we live. It is a rupture not because it does away with period styles, not because it eliminates ornament, and not because it stresses technology, but because it attacks the very idea of comfort itself. That is why people look to the past. Their nostalgia is not the result of an interest in archaeology, like some Victorian revivals, nor of a sympathy for a particular period, like Jeffersonian classicism. Nor is it a rejection of technology. People appreciate the benefits of central heating and electric lighting, but the rooms of a Colonial country home or of a Georgian mansion—which had neither—continue to attract them, for they provide a measure of something that is absent from the modern interior. People turn to the past because they are looking for something that they do not find in the present—comfort and well-being.

Comfort has changed not only qualitatively, but also quantitatively—it has become a mass commodity. After 1920, especially in America (somewhat later in Europe), physical comfort in the home was no longer the privilege of a part of society, it was accessible to all. This democratization of comfort has been due to mass production and industrialization. But industrialization has had other effects—it has made handwork a luxury (in that regard Le Corbusier’s analysis was correct). This, too, separates us from the past.

If we insist on Rococo we must be content with ersatz—a poor imitation that is neither commodious nor delightful. Only the wealthy or the very poor can live in the past; only the former do so by choice

So-called postmodernism has missed the point; putting in a stylized strip of molding or a symbolic classical column is not really the issue. It is not watered-down historical references that are missing from people’s homes. What is needed is a sense of domesticity, not more dadoes; a feeling of privacy, not neoPalladian windows; an atmosphere of coziness, not plaster capitals. Postmodernism is more interested in (mostly obscure) architectural history than in the evolution of the cultural ideas that history represents. Moreover, it is reluctant to question any of the basic principles of modernism—it is aptly named, for it is almost never antimodern. Despite its visual wit and fashionable insouciance, it fails to address the basic problem.

What is needed is a reexamination not of bourgeois styles, but of bourgeois traditions. We should look at the past not from a stylistic point of view, but regarding the idea itself of comfort. The seventeenth-century Dutch bourgeois interior, for example, has much to teach us about living in small spaces. It suggests how simple materials, appropriately sized and placed windows, and built-in furniture can create an atmosphere of cozy domesticity. The way that Dutch homes opened up onto the street, the careful variety of types of windows, the planned gradient of increasingly private rooms, and the sequence of small sitting places are architectural devices that are applicable still. The Queen Anne house offers similar lessons in informal planning. The Victorians were faced with technical devices more innovative than our own, and the ease with which they incorporated new technology into their homes without sacrificing traditional comforts is instructive. The American home of 1900 to 1920 shows that convenience and efficiency can be dealt with effectively without in any way creating a cold or machinelike atmosphere.

Reexamining bourgeois traditions means returning to house layouts that offer more privacy and intimacy than the socalled open plan, in which space is allowed to “flow” from one room to another. This produces interiors of great visual interest, but there is a price to be paid for this excitement. The space flows, but so also does sight and sound—not since the Middle Ages have homes offered as little personal privacy to their inhabitants. It is difficult for even small families to live in such open interiors, especially if they are using the large variety of home entertainment devices that have become popular—televisions, video recorders, audio equipment, electronic games, and so on. What is needed are many more small rooms—some need not be larger than alcoves—to conform to the range and variety of leisure activities in the modern home.

A reexamination of the bourgeois tradition of comfort is an implicit criticism of modernity, but it is not a rejection of change. Indeed, the evolution of comfort will continue. For the moment, this evolution is dominated by technology, though to a lesser degree than in the past. This need not dehumanize the home, any more than effective fireplaces or electricity did in the past. Can we really have coziness and robots? That will depend on how successful we are in turning away from modernism’s shallow enthusiasms, and developing a deeper and more genuine understanding of domestic comfort.

If comfort is objective, it should be possible to measure it. This is more difficult than it sounds. It is easier to know when we are comfortable than why, or to what degree. It would be possible to identify comfort by recording the personal reactions of large numbers of people, but this would be more like a marketing or opinion survey than a scientific study; a scientist prefers to study things one at a time, and especially to measure them. It turns out that in practice it is much easier to measure discomfort than comfort. To establish a thermal “comfort zone,” for example, one ascertains at which temperatures most people are either too cold or too hot, and whatever is in between automatically becomes “comfortable.” Or if one is trying to identify the appropriate angle for the back of a chair, one can subject people to angles that are too steep and too flat, and between the points where they express discomfort lies the “correct” angle. Similar experiments have been carried out concerning the intensity of lighting and noise, the size of room dimensions, the hardness and softness of sitting and lying furniture, and so on. In all these cases, the range of comfort is discovered by measuring the limits at which people begin to experience discomfort. When the interior of the Space Shuttle was being designed, a cardboard mock-up of the cabin was built. The astronauts were required to move around in this full-size model, miming their daily activities, and every time they knocked against a corner or a projection, a technician would cut away the offending piece. At the end of the process, when there were no more obstructions left, the cabin was judged to be “comfortable.” The scientific definition of comfort would be something like “Comfort is that condition in which discomfort has been avoided.”

The fallacy of the scientific definition of comfort is that it considers only those aspects of comfort that are measurable, and with not untypical arrogance denies the existence of the rest—many behavioral scientists have concluded that because people experience only discomfort, comfort as a physical phenomenon does not really exist at all. “Comfort is simply a verbal invention,” writes one engineer despairingly.” Of course, that is precisely what comfort is. It is an invention—a cultural artifice. Like all cultural ideas—childhood, family, gender—it has a past, and it cannot be understood without reference to its specific history. One-dimensional, technical definitions of comfort, which ignore history, are bound to be unsatisfactory. How rich, by comparison, are Baldwin’s and Alexander’s descriptions of comfort. They include convenience (a handy table), efficiency (a modulated light source), domesticity (a cup of tea), physical ease (deep chairs and cushions), and privacy (reading a book, having a talk). Inti¬ macy is also present in these descriptions. All these characteristics together contribute to the atmosphere of interior calm that is a part of comfort.

This is the problem with understanding comfort and with finding a simple definition. It is like trying to describe an onion. It appears simple on the outside, just a spheroidal shape. But this is deceptive, for an onion also has many layers. If we cut it apart, we are left with a pile of onion skins, but the original form has disappeared; if we describe each layer separately, we lose sight of the whole. To complicate matters further, the layers are transparent, so that when we look at the whole onion we see not just the surface but also something of the interior. Similarly, comfort is both something simple and complicated. It incorporates many transparent layers of meaning—privacy, ease, convenience—some of which are buried deeper than others.

The onion simile suggests not only that comfort has several layers of meaning, but also that the idea of comfort has developed historically. It is an idea that has meant different things at different times. In the seventeenth century, comfort meant privacy, which lead to intimacy and, in turn, to domesticity. The eighteenth century shifted the emphasis to leisure and ease, the nineteenth to mechanically aided comforts—light, heat, and ventilation. The twentieth-century domestic engineers stressed efficiency and convenience. At various times, and in response to various outside forces—social, economic, and technological—the idea of comfort has changed, sometimes drastically. There was nothing foreordained or inevitable about the changes. If seventeenth-century Holland had been less egalitarian and its women less independent, domesticity would have arrived later than it did. If eighteenth century England had been aristocratic rather than bourgeois, comfort would have taken a different turn. If servants had not been scarce in our century, it is unlikely that anyone would have listened to Beecher and Frederick. But what is striking is that the idea of comfort, even as it has changed, has preserved most of its earlier meanings. The evolution of comfort should not be confused with the evolution of technology. New technical devices usually—not always—rendered older ones obsolete. The electric lamp replaced the gasolier, which replaced the oil lamp, which replaced candles, and so on. But new ideas about how to achieve comfort did not displace fundamental notions of domestic well-being. Each new meaning added a layer to the previous meanings, which were preserved beneath. At any particular time, comfort consists of all the layers, not only the most recent.

So there it is, the Onion Theory of Comfort—hardly a definition at all, but a more precise explanation may be unnecessary. It may be enough to realize that domestic comfort involves a range of attributes—convenience, efficiency, leisure, ease, pleasure, domesticity, intimacy, and privacy—all of which contribute to the experience; common sense will do the rest. Most people—“I may not know why I like it, but I know what I like”—recognize comfort when they experience it. This recognition involves a combination of sensations— many of them subconscious—and not only physical, but also emotional as well as intellectual, which makes comfort difficult to explain and impossible to measure. But it does not make it any less real. We should resist the inadequate definitions that engineers and architects have offered us. Domestic well-being is too important to be left to experts; it is, as it has always been, the business of the family and theindividual. We must rediscover for ourselves the mystery of comfort, for without it, our dwellings will indeed be machines instead of homes.

A study by the University of Swansea in 2018 found that one in sevens tudents in the UK admitted to using an essay mill. The government has recently pledged to make essay-writing services illegal, but that won't stop operations based overseas.

The use of Turnitin for these purposes (detecting plagiarism) isn't uncontroversial. For one thing, it is a form of digital surveillance, which further mechanises the process of evaluation and risks weakening the trust between students and teachers. It can also mislead students into thinking that palgiarism is defined in quantitative terms: so long as you're below a particular threshold, anything goes.

I have heard plenty of dubious excuses for acts of plagiarism during these hearings. But there is one recurring explanation which, it seems to me, deserves more thoughtful consideration: 'I took too many notes.' It isn't just students who are familiar with information overload, one of whose effects is to morph authorship into a desperate form of curatorial management, organising chunks of text on a screen. The discerning scholarly self on which the humanities depend was concieved as the product of transitions between spaces -- library, lecture hall, seminar room, study -- linked together by work with pen and paper. When all this is replaced by the interfact with screen and keyboard, and everything dissolves into a unitary flow of 'content', the identity of the author -- as distinct from the texts they have read -- becomes harder to delineate.

For some years now, it's been noticeable how many students arrive at university feeling that every interaction is a test they might fail. They are anxious. Writing seems fraught with risk, a highly complicated task that can be executed correctly or not.

It wasn't merely the emphasis on obscure grammatical concepts that worried me, but the treatment of language in wholly syntactical terms, with the aim of distinguishing correct from incorrect usage. This is the way a computer treats language, as a set of symbols that generates commands to be executed, and which either succeeds or fails in that task.

In a journal article from August 2020, 'Learning under Lockdown: English Teaching in the Time of Covid-19', John Yandell notes that online classes create wholly closed worlds, where context and intertextuality disappear in favour of constant instruction. In these online environments, reading is informed not by prior reading experiences but by the toolkit that the teacher has provided, and is presented as occurring along a tramline of linear development. Different readings are reducible to better or worse readings: the more closely the student's reading approximates to the already finalised teacher's reading, the better it is. That, it would appear, is what reading with precision looks like.

In the utopia sold by the EdTech industry (the companies that provide platforms and software for online learning), pupils are guided and assessed continuously. When one task is completed correctly, the next begins, as in a computer game; meanwhile the platform providers are scraping and analysing data from the actions of millions of children. In this behaviourist set-up, teachers become more like coaches: they assist and motivate individual 'learners', but are no longer so important to the provision of education. And since it is no longer the sole responsibility of teachers or schools to deliver the curriculum, it becomes more centralised – the latest front in a forty-year battle to wrest control from the hands of teachers and local authorities.

In this vision, the laborious and expensive work of extracting data on literacy via surveys and tests, which produce scores only every few years, might eventually become unnecessary: the data gleaned by EdTech platforms could be combined and crunched instead. Blanket surveillance replaces the need for formal assessment.

In place of the Victorian distinction between the 'literate' and the 'illiterate', which mapped onto the basic class structure of industrial capitalism, the idea was to place children and adults on a sliding scale of literacy. This coincided with the growing awareness among economists of the value of education in increasing productivity and GDP: workers were reconceived as 'human capital', investment in which would generate future financial returns.

One of the assumptions here was that people with 'high' levels of literacy must already have acquired the levels below, so that someone who can, say, extract useful information from the markets pages of the Financial Times will definitely be able to follow a recipe, whereas the reverse may not be true. Where all this leaves the ability to get a niche joke or adapt an internet meme is unclear.

'Reading', according to the OECD, should involve 'understanding', but only in the minimal sense of responding correctly to a question. Confirming Adorno's worst fears of the 'primacy of practical reason', reading is no longer dissociable from the execution of tasks. And, crucially, the 'goals' to be achieved through the ability to read, the 'potential' and 'participation' to be realised, are economic in nature.

The ideological assumption, taken as read by the OECD or the World Economic Forum, that the benefits of literacy – indeed of education generally – are ultimately to be realised in the marketplace has provoked huge political disruption and psychological pain in the UK over the last ten years. The trebling of university tuition fees in 2012 was justified on the basis that the quality of higher education is commensurate with graduate earnings. The hope, when the new fee regime was introduced, was that a competitive market would spontaneously emerge as different 'providers' of higher education charged different rates according to the 'quality' of what they had to offer.

And since 2019, with the Treasury increasingly unhappy about the amount of student debt still sitting on the government's balance sheet and the government resorting to 'culture war' at every opportunity, there has been an effort to single out degree programmes that represent 'poor value for money', measured in terms of graduate earnings. Many of these programmes are in the arts and humanities, and are now habitually referred to by Tory politicians and their supporters in the media as 'low-value degrees'.

But if the agenda is to reduce the number of young people studying humanities subjects, and to steer them instead towards STEM subjects, finance and business studies, the rhetoric is superfluous: the tuition fee hike, combined with the growing profile of league tables, had already worked its magic.

One consequence of all this is that studying the humanities may become a luxury reserved for those who can fall back on the cultural and financial advantages of their class position. (This effect has already been noticed among young people going into acting, where the results are more visible to the public than they are in academia or heritage organisations.) Yet, given the changing class composition of the UK over the past thirty years, it's not clear that contemporary elites have any more sympathy for the humanities than the Conservative Party does. A friend of mine recently attended an open day at a well-known London private school, and noticed that while there was a long queue to speak to the maths and science teachers, nobody was waiting to speak to the English teacher. When she asked what was going on, she was told: 'I'm afraid parents here are very ambitious.' Parents at such schools, where fees have tripled in real terms since the early 1980s, tend to work in financial and business services themselves, and spend their own days profitably manipulating and analysing numbers on screens. When it comes to the transmission of elite status from one generation to the next, Shakespeare or Plato no longer has the same cachet as economics or physics.

Leaving aside the strategic political use of terms such as 'woke' and 'cancel culture', it would be hard to deny that we live in an age of heightened anxiety over the words we use, in particular the labels we apply to people. This has benefits: it can help to bring discriminatory practices to light, potentially leading to institutional reform. It can also lead to fruitless, distracting public arguments, such as the one that rumbled on for weeks over Angela Rayner's description of Conservatives as 'scum'.

Visit any actual school or university today (as opposed to the imaginary ones described in the Daily Mail or the speeches of Conservative ministers) and you will find highly disciplined, hierarchical institutions, focused on metrics, performance evaluations, 'behaviour' and quantifiable 'learning outcomes'. Andreas Schleicher is winning, not Michel Foucault. If young people today worry about using the 'wrong' words, it isn't because of the persistence of the leftist cultural power of forty years ago, but – on the contrary – because of the barrage of initiatives and technologies dedicated to reversing that power. The ideology of measurable literacy, combined with a digital net that has captured social and educational life, leaves young people ill at ease with the language they use and fearful of what might happen should they trip up.

Few people remember Brezhnev kindly. At best, he is a pathetic figure with bushy eyebrows stumbling across the international scene, jovial but almost incoherent under the weight of tranquillisers, vodka and oncoming dementia. At worst, he is the man who unleashed the Warsaw Pact armies to overthrow the Prague Spring in 1968, who destabilised half the world by sending Russian forces into Afghanistan in 1979, who devised the Brezhnev Doctrine licensing communist states to use armed force against any nation threatening to leave the 'socialist camp'. Susanne Schattenberg sets out to correct and sometimes reverse these impressions. 'I expected to be working on a Stalinist, a hardliner, an architect of domestic and foreign policies of repression,' she writes in the introduction to this book. But 'instead of a Cold Warrior, I was faced with a man who passionately fought for peace and ruined his health in the process. Instead of a dogmatic ideologue, a heart-throb who loved fast cars and liked to crack jokes.' A heart-throb? She adds, disarmingly: 'I will not escape accusations of being something of a Brezhnev apologist.'

He headed the Soviet Union, as leader of the Communist Party, from 1964 until his death in 1982. Before that, he had served as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet for several years. But no insatiable lust for power, no gift for intrigue, lay behind Brezhnev's ascent. The point was that nobody in the highest echelons of the party was afraid of him. Many quite liked him and admired his hard work, though some thought he was a bit of a nincompoop. His great selling point was that he wasn't Stalin or Khrushchev. Brezhnev, his colleagues assumed, wouldn't have them shot or send their families to Siberia. And unlike Khrushchev, Stalin's ebullient successor, he wouldn't suddenly fire them in a drunken rage or set them impossible targets in titanic, half-baked projects. He was someone the supreme nomenklatura – the Politburo members and the secretaries of the Central Committee – felt they could control and restrain if necessary.

Schattenberg defines him in the late 1930s as 'a rather normal example of the new type of engineer', somebody who was less interested in creating a new society than in getting back to a '"good" life in which one did not have to worry about where one's next meal was coming from and had time for hunting or sleigh rides'.

What attracted so many people to Brezhnev,' wrote Roy Medvedev, later a dissident who had no reason to like him, 'was his softness, the lack of the usual hardness and cruelty associated with party bosses of the time, a kindness that sometimes also came at the expense of business.' He detested the old Bolshevik management style of yelling and threatening, and where possible avoided punishing individuals.

Then, at a party congress in Moscow, Stalin noticed him. He liked Brezhnev's looks, tall and well-dressed: 'What a handsome Moldavian!' Always impressed by appearances, Stalin made him a candidate member of the Presidium, the supreme party body

What Stalin and Khrushchev had achieved with terror and humiliation, Brezhnev pushed through with his joviality and conviviality.' His reign, which would last for almost twenty years, is often dismissed today as 'the era of stagnation'. And yet the 1970s, especially, brought a turn towards consumers – small private cars, better housing and pensions – throughout the Soviet bloc. As Schattenberg puts it, 'for the first time in its entire history, Soviet power said to the people, “Relax” and did not demand enthusiasm from them.'

Brezhnev quite clearly considered Dubček his protégé.' In other words, he saw the Czechoslovak reform movement in narrow Soviet terms: as a cadre problem to be solved by a reshuffle of personalities, some cautious policy changes and the restoration of trust between Prague and Moscow. When it became clear that Dubček and his allies were proposing rights to free expression and political diversity, Brezhnev was baffled. Again, he 'simply did not understand' what they were on about. When he finally saw they were serious, he was appalled at the breach of trust and friendship by Dubček – 'his Sasha' – rather than by the political challenge.

According to Schattenberg, Brezhnev had almost nothing to do with the calamitous decision in December 1979 to send Soviet troops into Afghanistan. He was drugged and out of it: the troika running foreign policy kept him informed but concluded that he didn't grasp what was going on or understand the papers they made him sign. The Politburo apparently assumed that it would be a repeat of Czechoslovakia 1968: a quick invasion, no serious resistance, and a replacement of cadres. Instead they found themselves in a merciless nine-year war that would cost more than fourteen thousand Russian lives alone and destroy much of the Soviet system's remaining credibility at home.

Brought up within the party system, he could not imagine radical reform that went beyond what had happened after Stalin's death: the party had ceased to be the instrument of mass murder and of the lawless deportation of millions. So he tried, earnestly but without much success, to make the Soviet peoples safer, happier and better off. There was, perhaps, a chance to transform the USSR's governance in his first years of leadership. But such heresy was inconceivable to a 'homo sovieticus' like Leonid Ilyich. By the time Gorbachev set out to grapple with the monstrous faults in the political structure, only four years after Brezhnev's death, it was too late.

A special operative can find himself being played by Mark Wahlberg in a big budget movie, as Marcus Luttrell did in the 2013 adaptation of his memoir, Lone Survivor, so secret military actions aren't something you want to keep quiet about. As one serving SEAL told the Washington Post in 2011, neatly encapsulating the contradiction, 'we're the dark matter. We're the force that orders the universe but can't be seen.'

Recently, however, a wave of newly retired special operators from the War on Terror years have specialised in a different genre: the business self-help manual. These former military officers feel that a career spent planning deadly missions and leading men into messy wars makes them uniquely qualified to offer 'Battle-Tested Strategies for Creating Successful Organisations and Inspiring Extraordinary Results', as the subtitle of one such manual puts it. Arguably the most successful current practitioner of the genre is the retired four-star general Stanley McChrystal, who has never been shy about using his own achievements to show how a leader gets things done.

In his time at JSOC, McChrystal brought its fractious army and navy components closer together, better aligned it with the CIA and NSA, and introduced modern methods and information technology into a world that prized what the Bush-era euphemism called 'kinetic military action' – i.e. killing – over language skills, local intelligence and analytic capabilities. Whether any actual change resulted from McChrystal's efforts is doubtful, however, given the number of civilians killed by JSOC and the vast number of Iraqis who turned against the invading forces.

Many in JSOC never forgave the Obama administration for this slight against a commander they adored. McChrystal's self-mythologising – ten-mile daily runs, single daily meal, beer and bonding sessions with his subordinates – was admired by those in special operations, who had little respect for lesser mortals with four stars on their epaulettes. The regular military, however, did not worship McChrystal, or the rules of engagement he applied in Afghanistan. His preference for deploying small covert teams away from prying eyes clashed with the expansive boots-on-the-ground counterinsurgency operations that could be scrutinised by reporters, Pentagon higher-ups, politicians and Nato allies. McChrystal's methods weren't popular with the people of Afghanistan either: civilians were captured and killed, villages and livelihoods destroyed, and the US pursued close relationships with the kleptocrats and warlords who had milked the country dry.

The US corporate world has long adored 'how to succeed' manuals.

But even more enticing than the life lessons of corporate executives are war manuals redeployed as business handbooks.

As an unnamed Deutsche Bank executive told the Washington Post, 'senior management is much more likely to listen to military commanders because they're cool and they've killed people than to a McKinsey guy in a pinstripe suit.'

In an acute diagnosis of the power elite in the mid-20th century, the sociologist C. Wright Mills described US military men as 'the warlords [who] along with fellow travellers and spokesmen, are attempting to plant their metaphysics firmly among the population at large'. Military men and diplomats now serve on the boards of companies whose business they know nothing about, and are given direct access to the training grounds of the captains of industry and politics.

Military whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning languished in prison, or died in abjection in care homes, devastated and demeaned like Ian Fishback. And the men who led them went on to be feted in classrooms and boardrooms, to preside over universities, publish bestsellers, collect starry-eyed puff pieces in the business sections of newspapers and star as the dark and brooding heroes of motivational war fiction.

MacLeish was critical of Yeats's later work: it hadn't taken up the challenge of the times and addressed 'the social and political and economic structure of the postwar world' as it ought to have done. Yeats was unimpressed by the assumption that 'the right public material' should be 'politics', as he wrote to his friend Dorothy Wellesley, copying out for her his nettled response to MacLeish's criticism, a deft little poem titled 'Politics', which contrasted the conversation of expert men chewing over the perilous state of contemporary Europe with the vision of 'a girl' standing across the room.

Maybe what they say is true

Of war and war's alarms;

But O that I were young again

And held her in my arms.

'In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms.' Well, if so, then so much the worse for 'our time', seems the gist of Yeats's response.

Politics is 'participation in the state, zeal and passion for the state'. 'Not only do I disagree that human destiny should be absorbed in state and society,' Mann countered, 'I even find this opinion repulsively inhuman.'

A properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

'Let the world know me,' he wrote in his diary, 'but only when everyone's dead.'

Perhaps unsurprisingly Mann greatly admired Freud, less as the advocate of emancipatory self-acquaintance than as the thinker who recognised that 'civilisation is only possible under the pressure of certain prohibitions,' and who understood that 'sublimation and repression' were crucial elements in the making of culture. He could hardly have found an account closer to his heart.

That he did not commit forbidden acts was no doubt partly down to timidity, but it was also the product of a tenacious romanticism which led him intuitively to feel that the most precious experiences were those that avoided the vulgar trap of something actually happening. ('Heard melodies are sweet,' as Keats observed, 'but those unheard/Are sweeter.')

Fellow admirers will deduce from my account that The Magician is a sort of companion volume to The Master (2004), Tóibín's celebrated novel about Henry James, and a book similarly preoccupied by the thought that what might normally be construed as psychological damage can turn out to be just what a novelist needs.

The great works of Yeats, with whom I began, are all about a lonely romanticism finding itself forced to enter the public world of 'what's difficult', and finding that one way of attempting the task was to become a man of masks.

I sometimes wonder whether Latin would have been more useful to me than typing, but I do quite like the latter. There is something satisfying about the exercise of that kind of muscle memory.

What does any of this have to do with Virginia Woolf? Only typing. I typed Mrs Dalloway from beginning to end. There is something surprisingly intimate about entering text in this way. I knew that by typing up the novel I would refamiliarise myself with it. I didn't anticipate that I would learn something about the minutiae of Woolf's style, and in particular her often eccentric use of commas, semicolons and other punctuation marks.

The element of anticipation is important here, because typing, which relies on muscle memory, is in many ways about anticipation, it is the expression of anticipation. Even as I type the word 'anticipation', my fingers prepare themselves for the falling into place of that concluding 'tion' which, after years of entering such words, falls trippingly from the fingers. As my partner pointed out to me, 'language is a kind of music and typing is a way of playing it.'

The struggle for sovereignty against shape-shifting imperialisms naturally takes many forms. What Malians want is 'libération' – a popular word among supporters of Goïta's junta – not just from jihadists but from Western high-handedness. What Burkinabes want is completion of the reforms that began eight years ago.

Last October, the Parti pour le Développement et le Changement left the ruling coalition, citing the government's 'lack of response' to the jihadist challenge. The party's founder, Saran Sérémé, spelled out its grievance: 'People feel abandoned when they see officials on television strutting about in shopping malls, at gala receptions, making speeches, when they [the people] are under the yoke of jihadists.'

Between them they formulated the plan for Mali's long 'transition', which involves seeking Russian assistance in the fight against the jihadists. Goïta, like many Malian army officers, was trained in Russia, and the army is familiar with Russian military equipment. Goïta and Maïga made Russian involvement more attractive to the public by hyping up grievances, legitimate and spurious, against the French. They relied in part on the propaganda skills of Russian operatives, and when the French tried to compete the result was lacklustre at best.

In Mali, the Russian intervention, though secretive, appears to involve not just Wagner but state forces too. Success here would seriously compromise French influence in West Africa at large, which may explain the overexcited interventions by French officials, including Macron and the minister of foreign affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, who called Goïta's coup 'illégitime'. Last month France's ambassador was expelled from Mali and sent back to Paris with a diplomatic note: it wasn't usual, the note said, for a state to retain an ambassador in a country whose government it refused to acknowledge. This put Macron in an impossible position. He can't recognise the junta without lending it legitimacy, but not doing so means he can't realistically object to Russian involvement. Under these circumstances, a French military presence in Mali becomes a political absurdity.

Mali, they suggested, was now at the mercy of a foreign power. Given France's history in Mali, the hypocrisy is pretty brazen. But the Malian ambassador I spoke to was just as cynical about the Russians: 'Emergency military interventions based on geopolitical considerations have never brought lasting stability and security to a country.' Russian assistance comes at a price, and it may be higher than that exacted by the French. The countries of West Africa can, in theory, influence French policy through lobbying, media campaigns and the demands of civil society, even if they rarely manage this in practice. Russian foreign policy is not sensitive to pressures of this kind.

Mexico City, in the words of the critic Carlos Monsiváis, is 'above all, too many people'. In Los rituales del caos (1995), Monsiváis summed up the 'multitudes surrounding multitudes': the swarms of cars, the street pedlars and fire eaters encircling them at traffic lights, the massed congregants at the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the millions of passengers crammed daily into the Metro. Any attempt at a coherent portrait of this teeming excess seems doomed to failure. There are too many people with too many stories, too many sights, sounds, smells, too many historical epochs mingled together, too many possible books to write.

The book's kaleidoscopic form reflects 'the juxtapositions the cityscape entails – the tyre shop opposite the colonial church, the corporate skyscraper next to the taco stand'.

In a 1917 poem, Alfonso Reyes imagined the area as 'the most transparent region of the air', a phrase that would be met with grim, smog-choked laughter by its current inhabitants. As Villoro observes, Reyes himself was expressing alarm at the frantic pace of urbanisation as early as 1940: 'What have you done to my high metaphysical valley?' The days when the white peaks of Popocatépetl and Ixtaccíhuatl formed a constant backdrop to the city's south-east are long gone. In fact, they are now so rarely seen that when they are visible residents may say: 'The volcanoes came out' – as if the mountains had 'decided one day to take a look at us'. 'On those rare, clear days,' according to Villoro, 'we're a bit better.' Moods are lifted and morals improved simply by the 'possibility of a horizon'.

For Villoro, life in 'Chilangopolis' involves a simultaneous awareness and denial of impending disaster. 'Our version of the magazine Popular Mechanics would have to be called Popular Apocalypse and be dedicated to earthquakes, landslides, volcanic activity, water shortages, pollution, theft of cash machines, pirate taxis, and other tragedies.' Yet 'we believe that no harm can come to us,' thanks to a 'strange collective delusion' that the worst has already happened. The feeling that you're already living 'beyond the apocalypse' may seem a meagre source of comfort, but it makes for excellent dark humour. For Villoro, it also offers an existential alibi: it means 'we're the result, not the cause of the evils.'

Like any personal portrait of a city, Horizontal Vertigo evokes the present and recollects the past. Time and space can be collapsed into a narrative with at once personal and collective meanings.

in presenting his own memories of the city, and episodes from his childhood, Villoro wants to avoid nostalgia: 'I'm not idealising what has disappeared, but I do have to make note of an unquestionable fact: the city in those days was so different that it's almost shocking that it has the same name.'

'That city ended. That country is finished. There is no memory of the Mexico of those years. And nobody cares – who could feel nostalgia for that horror?' The apocalypse has already happened.

Five hundred years before the hoard was deposited, at the time the Romans abandoned the island, Britain was about as linguistically homogeneous as it has ever been. From one end to the other, people spoke dialects of Early British, a P-Celtic language. Its southern dialects survived to become Welsh, Cornish and Breton, while its northern dialects vanished as living languages but left enough traces for philologists to form some idea of them. This linguistic unity came to an end in the fifth century, after the Roman departure from Britain, with the arrival from the east of incomers speaking Old English (Anglo-Saxon), and from the west of people speaking Irish Gaelic, a Q-Celtic language. (Fifteen hundred years ago the two branches of Celtic seem to have been about as mutually comprehensible as modern Dutch and modern German.) The Anglo-Saxon incomers initially settled along the coasts of eastern England, the Irish speakers especially in western Scotland, where they founded the kingdom of Dál Riata. This left its mark on Galloway, which at the time of the hoard was perhaps the most linguistically and ethnically mixed part of Britain.

The name Galloway itself is thought to derive from Irish gall-gaedhíl, literally 'foreigner Gaels'. These were probably – at this place and time everything has to be qualified – linguistically and ethnically Irish, but they had 'gone Scandinavian', rejecting Christianity and adopting a pirate lifestyle. Unsurprisingly, everybody hated them. One Irish chronicler writes that bad as the Vikings were, the gall-gaedhíl were worse.

As for the question of why it was buried, it's often thought that hoards were a product of instability and insecurity. The massive Cuerdale Hoard, for instance, with its thousands of coins giving a date of 903-10, is believed by some to be the war chest of a Viking group that retreated to York after the expulsion of the Vikings from Dublin in 902. It's a bad sign if a hoard had a sole depositor who never retrieved it, worse if there were several depositors, and very bad indeed if no one from a whole warband (or pirate crew, in later years) survived to come back for it. Since instability and insecurity were the norm in Viking Age Galloway, however, this doesn't help narrow things down.

It's been said that Vikings decorated everything with a surface, themselves included, and this is true even of the smallest items, such as the tongues of four beast-heads tying together two ribbon arm-rings to make the largest of the double arm-rings. Then there's the Anglo-Saxon cross, the brooches and arm-rings that must once have declared the wearers' status to the world, and the golden bird-pin. The bird has a long neck and appears to be standing on one long leg. It looks for all the world like a flamingo. But surely no one from ninth-century north-west Europe can ever have seen a flamingo?

Large thermonuclear bombs are a thousand times more powerful than the first nuclear weapons. One will destroy a few square miles of city, the other hundreds. The first victims are killed by the sheer force and heat of the blast wave. Its diffraction causes the entire human body to be compressed, resulting in embolisms in the arteries and crushing the lungs and heart. Then there is the thermal pulse, which causes flash burns on exposed skin. A large proportion of the victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were killed by the heat. A smaller number were trapped in rubble and burned to death. Along with the blast and heat there is ionising radiation, which creates defects in individual atoms, morphs the blood and bone marrow, breaks chromosomes and irreparably damages cells. Victims vomit, and suffer ataxia and delirium. Less is known about longer lasting nuclear fallout. Marshall Islanders subjected to fallout in 1954 suffered 'beta-burns' within 24 hours and nuclear testing rendered their atolls uninhabitable.

The usual fate of revolutionary weapons is for their startling effects to be quickly nullified, or at least blunted, either by the invention of countermeasures or by everyone acquiring them. But effective defences against thermonuclear weapons have been hard to come by. Instead, their very power has constrained their use. War has always been destructive for the losers. It's sometimes destructive for the victors too: the Soviet Union lost 13 per cent of its population in the Second World War.

Nuclear weapons haven't been used in war since 1945, but there have been many close calls. In 1956, a B-47 bomber disappeared over the Mediterranean with two nuclear weapons on board. It was never found. In 1960, US nuclear early warning systems were accidentally triggered by the moon. The same happened with flocks of migrating geese. In 1966, a B-52 crashed mid-air and dropped three thermonuclear bombs on a Spanish village (the cores didn't detonate). These are the accidents. The times when intentional nuclear war seemed imminent are better known. Countries with nuclear weapons often claim that only their head of state or government can order their use, but in practice states recognise that this would make them vulnerable: what if the national leader is dead? Most have allowed some delegation, so that in extremis subordinates or military commanders can order nuclear strikes.

In the immediate postwar period, US military theorists were impressed by the power of what Kaplan called the 'absolute weapon', but they saw it principally as an advance on the proven techniques of incendiary bombing. Bernard Brodie, an academic at Yale and then the RAND corporation, described the implications of nuclear weapons in 1946: there can be no winners in the conventional sense, and the advantage is in the threat rather than the execution. In order to deter attack, all you have to do is show that if you're hit you will hit back. When a state lets it be known that it has the capacity to carry out a second-strike retaliation it's almost unthinkable that it would be subjected to nuclear attack in the first place.

Kaufmann argued that threatening to respond to minor aggression with total nuclear war was an ineffective bluff. The US was saddling itself with a choice between 'the immeasurable horrors of atomic war' and loss of prestige if its bluff were called. A nuclear response to non-nuclear aggression far from the homeland was like 'a sparrow hunt with a cannon'. Practical maintenance of America's imperial and quasi-imperial positions required conventional military forces and alliances in Germany, Taiwan and South Korea.

There were other ways of waging 'limited war'. In 1957, Henry Kissinger argued for smaller, tactical nuclear weapons. Kaufmann and others pulled his argument apart by showing how easily the use of small nuclear weapons on the battlefield would escalate to full thermonuclear exchange. But this wasn't enough to stop the generals from deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. There are still around a hundred American nuclear bombs in bases in Germany, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Fear of a general thermonuclear war was at its peak in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but we now know that this was the period of US total nuclear dominance. At the time, American intelligence estimates exaggerated the number of Soviet ICBMs by a factor of ten (the mythical 'missile gap'), and greatly exaggerated the number of Soviet warheads and Soviet bombers – which in any case couldn't have reached the US without refuelling in vulnerable Arctic bases. In fact, until the mid 1960s, the Soviet Union wouldn't have been able to survive an American nuclear attack, and couldn't be confident in its capacity to launch a large second-strike retaliation.

All nuclear strategy contains an element of madness, which Kahn seemed to personify. Much of the science of nuclear deterrence was, and still is, a matter of bluster.

Kahn's analysis wasn't of the highest quality – there he sat, considering World War Eight (in 1973) – but he did make one useful contribution. He conceived the thought experiment 0f the 'doomsday machine', a device that would destroy the entire world population if any nuclear weapon were used. Although it would mean perfect deterrence, he argued that – because of the risk of accident – to build such a machine would be a great mistake. Kahn didn't know it at the time, but as Daniel Ellsberg later revealed, the 'doomsday machine' was only a slight extension of US nuclear designs.

Politicians gave instructions on how nuclear war should be fought, and the generals in Omaha ignored them. In the event of a crisis, the US president would be given a binder, the 'Black Book', containing four or five options for nuclear war. Even the most restrained option would involve hundreds of strikes. The full details – which weapons would be used on which targets – were contained in the 'Blue Book', which no president or civilian leader was allowed to see until 1989.

After 1991 it was no longer possible to pretend that Moscow was a serious competitor to American global power. But US missiles were still pointed at Russian cities, obscure factories and fields that might serve as improvised airstrips.

Advocating non-proliferation is a common hobby for retired American officials with time on their hands and a less than clean conscience. Were the US actually committed to limiting nuclear weapons, it would at the very least have to declare a 'no first use' policy for its own nuclear arsenal. The Soviet Union, China and India have all made such a pledge in the past (Britain and France have not). Kaplan takes seriously Obama's professed desire for 'a world without nuclear weapons', but the Obama administration refused to declare no first use. Its successes on nuclear matters – the Iran nuclear deal and the new START arms reduction treaty with Russia, signed in 2010 – were overshadowed by its commitments to build the next generation of US nuclear weapons systems. In many respects Obama was a continuity president in matters of imperial management.

Ellsberg argued that every US president has used nuclear weapons 'in the precise way that a gun is used when it is pointed at someone in a confrontation, whether or not the trigger is pulled'. Eisenhower threatened to use them in the Korean War and against China. Kennedy came close during the Cuban crisis. In 1969, Nixon threatened to use them in Vietnam. George H.W. Bush threatened Iraq with 'nuclear retaliation'. The fact that none of these threats was carried out doesn't mean they weren't significant.

As Kaplan says, discussion of US nuclear weapons describes them as a deterrent, but 'American policy has always been to strike first pre-emptively.'

The balance of power among nuclear states has fluctuated. The US has sought nuclear superiority over other states at all times, and has threatened to use nuclear weapons with dull regularity. It has no sustained appetite for arms control treaties and its war plans have included genocidal first strikes.

In March, the UK committed to increasing its nuclear stockpile by 40 per cent, reversing four decades of reduction.

China is the only thermonuclear power committed to a policy of no first use.

The most dangerous moment of the Cold War was in the early 1960s, when an aggressive and overwhelmingly dominant nuclear power saw itself in competition with an adversary that didn't have equivalent nuclear forces. The US and China may be approaching a similar point.

There is a widespread belief that nuclear weapons can be thanked for the fact that there has been no total war between major powers since 1945. In The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution, Keir Lieber and Daryl Press suggest that these grand claims are mistaken. There have indeed been no large-scale wars, but in all other respects international politics resemble the pre-nuclear age. States with nuclear weapons don't act as if they are immune from external attack, and they still engage in reckless expeditionary wars and sometimes scuffles with one another. The main argument Lieber and Press put forward is that this is not just a legacy of old behaviour but a consequence of the nature of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons are too powerful for most conceivable scenarios: in Edward Luttwak's unimproved-on phrase, they 'exceed the culminating point of military utility'. The only benefit they have had for the states that possess them is protection against all-out conquest of the homeland. But conventional armies are still required. Lieber and Press show that stalemate between nuclear powers doesn't happen automatically. It takes effort to build and maintain a nuclear force that can survive a first strike and retaliate. Once states have reached stalemate with second-strike forces – the Soviet Union in the 1960s, China now – they must monitor their adversaries for signs of technological breakthrough that might allow for an attack that would disarm them.

Nuclear strategists systematically underestimate the chances of nuclear accident: it has no place in the logic of strategy. But there have been too many close calls for accidental use to be discounted. The stakes may be anthropogenic extirpation.

The stronger argument against abolition is practical. Nuclear weapons can be renounced but nuclear capability can't: our energy needs won't allow it. And once you have that capability, the silos can always be refilled. When the only rule is the rule of force, agreements between states are always provisional.

Until recently, a rematch between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in April's presidential election looked inevitable, with polls predicting a comfortable Macron victory, albeit narrower than in 2017, when he won 66 per cent of the vote. But then, last summer, a new candidate emerged, as it became clear that the right-wing writer and commentator Éric Zemmour had presidential ambitions.

There were many more young people – most of them men (and many maskless) – at Zemmour's rally than you see at meetings held by the established political parties. Almost all of them were white and looked like they came from Paris's posher areas. They were not the progeny of the gilets jaunes or working-class Le Pen voters in the dying mill towns of northern France. Many of them would have received their political baptism in La Manif pour tous, which led the opposition to gay marriage legislation in 2013, taking the entire political class by surprise.

He is often described as 'extrême droite', but there are clear differences between him and the Le Pen family and their Rassemblement National (RN). For one thing, he is not a career politician. He has never run for election or had a government job, he has never been a card-carrying member of a political party or engaged in political militancy. He enters the race without the baggage of a far-right or lepeniste past.

Zemmour is a declinist, in the French tradition that goes back to the 18th century, but his account is an idiosyncratic one. It does not begin with the storming of the Bastille, but with the 1763 Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years' War and enshrined the global primacy of England (Zemmour rarely calls it Great Britain, and never the United Kingdom). For him, the Treaty of Paris led to the continental supremacy of Prussia, and then to a unified Germany.

Napoleon tried to restore France's glory but overreached by extending its continental empire beyond its 'natural' borders, which, Zemmour writes in Mélancolie française (2010), encompass Belgium, Luxembourg, the German Rhineland and northwestern Italy. The consequence of his hubris was the defeat at Waterloo in 1815, a huge tragedy, since France had been the 'beating heart of Europe, and thus of the world, for a thousand years'. Unlike many on the far right, Zemmour isn't a nostalgist for colonialism. The English got the best parts of the world, as he sees it, while France's colonial conquests yielded little of value apart from soldiers to fight its wars. Worse, colonial rule led to the arrival, or counter-colonisation, of immigrants from France's empire, most of them Muslims – the source of most of France's woes.

There was, he believes, a final effort to rescue France in the mid 20th century, with the creation of the Fifth Republic by Charles de Gaulle, his hero and model – another thing that sets him apart from the Le Pen dynasty and others on the French right, who see de Gaulle as the man who surrendered to the FLN and 'lost' Algeria. But it was too late: France was already 'withdrawing quietly from History'.

For Zemmour, the real culprits are the French elites, left and right, who sold France out to globalisation, economic liberalism and multiculturalism.

Zemmour's nostalgia for the PCF and its relationship with the old white working class clearly sets him apart from extrême droite of the FN/RN, which would never have anything good to say about 'socialo-communistes'. But Zemmour, unlike the RN, doesn't have a significant working-class following; his appeal is much stronger among the social classes viscerally hostile to the left, especially conservative middle-class Catholics.

The terrorist incidents of the last decade – Mohammed Merah's killing of seven people, including three children, in 2012; the attacks by al-Qaida and IS in 2015; the beheading of the schoolteacher Samuel Paty in 2020 – have stoked fears of Islam, and the French mainstream has fanned the flames, making the country's Muslim citizens even more vulnerable. Macron and his education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, for example, have launched a campaign against 'Islamic separatism', though there is no movement that advocates Sharia law or 'separating' from the Republic. The notion – held almost universally on the right and shared by a good part of the left – that political Islam poses a challenge, even a threat, to the French Republic is a figment of the collective imagination.

Zemmour makes it clear that he doesn't believe Islam can be modernised. What place, then, can Muslims have in his France? He offers them the possibility of 'assimilation' into the French nation, which, at minimum, would oblige them to make their religious practice private (as if the great majority don't already do this), 'a simple spirituality, ahistorical and apolitical', as Napoleon demanded of Judaism.

But for Islam to be relegated to the private sphere is, Zemmour informs us, 'vehemently rejected by 99 per cent of Muslims'. So much for assimilation. He sums up his conception of assimilation with the shopworn proverb, 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do.' In France today, this means two big things: a ban on the wearing of the hijab or headscarf in public, and the legal obligation of parents to give their child a French first name.

What 'Anglo-Saxons' call ethnic identity was effaced in the name of greater social harmony. For someone who thinks France's decline began in 1763, his account of his childhood is nostalgic, evoking a country where everyone got along just fine.

He reproaches 'foreign' Jews – those who came in large numbers to France from Eastern Europe from the 1880s on – for their failure to assimilate, explaining the antisemitism of Charles Maurras, the founder of Action Française and one of Zemmour's guiding intellectual influences, as driven by repugnance for the Jews' stubborn attachment to their identity. This attitude, he claims, was quite unlike the racialised antisemitism of the Nazis, and it largely faded away after the war. That he, a Jew, is now the presidential candidate of neo-Maurrasian Catholic traditionalists suggests that he may not be entirely wrong.

Zemmour regards Israel as a foreign country like any other and never visits it.

It is very good that there are yellow Frenchmen, black Frenchmen, brown Frenchmen. They show that France is open to all races and that it has a universal vocation. But on the condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France would no longer be France. We are first and foremost a European people of the white race.

He looks at a group of non-white people and, without wanting to know who they are, what they do, essentialises them and sees their presence as a problem, indeed as a threat to France. He judges them not by the content of their character but by the colour of their skin. There is a word for this. Neither Jean-Marie Le Pen nor Donald Trump, to cite two figures to whom Zemmour has been compared, has spoken in public about people of colour in the way Zemmour does regularly.

He is also a xenophobe, a label one hesitates to affix even to Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has visited many countries and speaks English. By contrast, Zemmour, who does not speak English, rarely leaves the Paris area, where he has spent his whole life.

As for Marine Le Pen, Zemmour's candidacy has achieved the remarkable feat of making her appear almost moderate.

Zemmour is aware that he is offering a heightened version of what much of France privately thinks. The claim that he is being honest where others are defeated by cowardice, political correctness and 'le wokeisme' is central to his appeal.

Dual nationals convicted even of minor crimes (presumably including drug offences) would be stripped of French citizenship, and 'national preference' in employment would be implemented.

In the introduction to Un quinquennat pour rien, Zemmour claims that France's 'civilisational war' with Islam can only be won through a protracted 'cultural revolution', via a modern-day 'Kulturkampf'. A 'state of cultural emergency' must be decreed, which would 'render inoperative all jurisprudence enacted in the name of human rights, to stop the invasion and colonisation of our land, if there is still time'; the rule of law would be suspended 'to protect the nation in peril'. Zemmour has, in true Bonapartist style, promised a referendum immediately after his election to rubberstamp his ability to stop the courts blocking his measures – in effect, to allow him to rule as a dictator.

Given the fragmentation and weakness of the left, the failure of Macron to create a centrist party worthy of the name, and a Zemmourised LR, there is legitimate cause to worry for the future of France.

Songlines, also known as Tjukurpa, Dreaming tracks, creation law, are the sung pathways of First Australian ancestors. These invisible tracks were created by the totems, or ancestral beings, of Aboriginal creation myths as they wandered across the continent naming everything they saw and leaving a trail of words and musical notes in their wake. Songlines chart critical sites and resources, linking stories to landscape: they are both map and compass. They provide practical signposts such as the location of rivers and caves – survival knowledge essential to desert life – but also describe the origins of the universe as well as moral codes and their consequences.

Knowledge of the songs and stories that constitute this collective worldview (known as 'the Dreaming') is a birthright – it can't be acquired or appropriated – and access is restricted according to gender, kinship and place. This means that the artists on show at Songlines, the National Museum of Australia's exhibition of First Australian art, have story rights only to the sections that traverse their bit of Country. (The exhibition is on display at the Box in Plymouth until 27 February before travelling to Paris and Berlin.) A songline might begin in land belonging to one Indigenous group and move through another and another: there are more than four hundred distinct groups and languages. The many collaborative works in the exhibition therefore required 'everyone to know what they can and can't tell ... a precise knowledge of how ... kinship, Country and story fit together'.

Whether you start the exhibition in Martu Country, the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands or Ngaanyatjarra (NPY) Lands, the same origin narrative emerges: the malefic pursuit of women. (Gallery staff warn visitors about this 'controversial' material.) The Dreaming story of the Seven Sisters, one of the most celebrated songlines, crosses half the continent, from the Central Desert to the West Coast. It describes the Sisters' attempt to escape Wati Nyiru, a shapeshifting sorcerer. His hunt is relentless, but their flight and their courage become part of the Dreaming: the narrative of the story – every plot twist and close shave, even the women's ultimate demise – can be traced on the features of the land and the night sky. They become boulders, dig into caves or dive in waterholes, creating sacred sites recognisable to their descendants. When they fling Wati Nyiru into the air and, defeated, fly up to the firmament, they become the star clusters we know as Orion and the Pleiades.

The Songlines curators are all First Australians and our encounter with the pieces is unmediated by the usual gallery interface: it was not felt necessary, for instance, to give the songlines legitimacy by invoking the familiar tropes of Greek mythology. First Australian culture is testament to 50,000 years of survival – or as many Indigenous intellectuals refer to it (incorporating a sense of political resistance), 'survivance'.

Songlines is a triumph, a feat of immersion without condescension or self-abasement, without flattery or false intimacy. This is one of the oldest cosmologies on Earth. The words 'terra nullius' are nowhere to be found at the Box.

'Fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.'

'If your writing is going smoothly and you're comfortable writing a few thousand words a day, these are sure signs it's probably bad.'

'A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others.' Naipaul is not a myth to me. Now and then someone tells me they've read him and offers an opinion, and I don't recognise the man they're describing.

The Holy Land has never seemed more remote or unattainable than it does to a Jew of Sitka. It is on the far side of the planet, a wretched place ruled by men united only in their resolve to keep out all but a worn fistful of small-change Jews. For half a century, Arab strongmen and Muslim partisans, Persians and Egyptians, socialists and nationalists and monarchists, pan-Arabists and pan-Islamists, traditionalists and the Party of Ali, have all sunk their teeth into Eretz Yisroel and worried it down to bone and gristle. Jerusalem is a city of blood and slogans painted on the wall, severed heads on telephone poles.

As Shpringer has inferred from the marks on Lasker's arm, the deceased's apparent tourniquet of choice was a leather strap, black, about half an inch wide. Halfway along the strap hangs a small leather box designed to hold a slip of paper on which a scribe, with ink and a feather, has written four passages from the Torah. Each morning the pious Jew twines one of these doodads along his left arm, ties another to his forehead, and prays for understanding of the kinds of God Who obliges somebody to do something like that every damn day of his life. But there is nothing inside the box on Emanuel Lasker's prayer strap. It's just the thing he chose to use to dilate the vein on his arm.

" Your father played chess, " Hertz Shemets once said, " like a man with a toothache, a hemorrhoid, and gas. " He sighed, he moaned. He tugged in fits at the patchy remnant of his brown hair, or chased it with his fingers back and forth across his pate like a pastry chef scattering flour on a marble slab. The blunders of his opponents were each a separate cramp in the abdomen. His own moves, however daring, however startling and original and strong, struck him like successive pieces of terrible news, so that he covered his mouth and rolled his eyes at the sight of them.

By now they were all staunch Alaskan Jews, which meant they were utopians, which means they saw imperfection everywhere they looked.

She pitied Isidor Landsman deeply for the loss of his family, for the suffering he had endured in the camps. But she was one of those Polar Bear kids who handled their own feelings of guilt at having escaped the filth, the starvation, the diches and killing factories by offering survivors a constant stream of advice, information, and criticism disguised as morale boosting. As if the choking, low-hanging black pall of the Destruction could be lifted by one determined kibitzer.

Landsman's father played chess. Every morning, in rain, snow, or fog, he walked two miles to the Hotel Einstein coffee shop, sat down at an aluminum-topped table in the back, facing the door, and took out a small set of maple and cherry chessmen that had been a present from his brother in law. Every night he sat at his bench in the back of hte little house on Adler Street where Landsman grew up, in Halibut point, looking over the eight or nine correspondence games he had going at any one time. He wrote notes for Chess Review. He revised a biography of Tartakower that he never quite finished or abandoned. He drew a pension from the German government. And, with hte help of his brother-in-law, he taught his son to hate the game he himself loved.

" You don't want to do that, " Landsman's father would plead after Landsman released, with bloodless fingers, his knight or pawn to meet the fate that always came as a surprise to Landsman, no matter how much he studied, practiced, or played the game of chess. " Take it from me. "

" I do. "

" You don't. "

But in the service of his own small misery, Landsman could be stubborn, too. Satisfied, burning with shame, he wouldw atch unfold the grim destiny that he had been unable to foresee. And Landsman's father would demolish him, flay him, vivisect him, gazing at his son all the while from behind the sagging porch of his face.

After some years of this sport, Landsman sat down at his mother's typewriter to write his father a letter in which he confessed his loathing for the game of chess, and begged his father not to force him to play anymore. Landsman carried this letter in his satchel for a week, enduring three more bloody defeats, and then mailed it from the Untershtat post office. Two days later, Isidor Landsman killed himself, in room 21 of the Hotel Einstein, by an overdose of Nembutal.

After that Landsman started to have some problems. He wet the bed, got fat, stopped talking. His mother put him in therapy with a remarkably gentle and ineffectual doctor named Melamed. It was not until twenty-three years after his father's death that Landsman rediscovered the fatal letter, in a box that also held a fair copy of the unfinished biography of Tartakower. It turned out that Landsman's father had never even opened the letter from his son, let alone read it. By the time the mailman delivered it, Landsman's father was already dead.

Landsman is at the wheel of a 1971 Chevrolet Chevelle Super Sport, which he bought ten years ago in an access of nostalgic optimism and has driven until all its secret flaws seem indistinguishable from his own.

She leaves the door open, and Landsman standing there on the thick coir mat that says GET LOST. Landsman touches two fingers to the mezuzah on his way in and then gives them a perfunctory kiss. That is what you do if you are a believer, like Berko, or a mocking asshole, like Landsman.

Goldy is wearing his polar-bear jammies, the height of retrospective chic for an Alaskan Jewish kid. Polar bears, snowflakes, igloos, the northern imagery that was so ubiquitous when Landsman was a boy, it's all back in style again. Only this time it seems to be meant ironically. Snowflakes, yes, the Jews found them here, though, thanks to greenhouse gases, there are measurable fewer that in hte old days. But no polar bears. No igloos. No reindeer. Mostly just a lot of angry Indians, fog, and rain, and half a century of a sense of mistakenness so keen, worked so deep into the system of hte Jews, that it emerges everywhere, even on their children's pajamas.

They shake hands again. This conversation is the equivalent of Landsman's kissing the mezuzah, the kind of thing that starts out as a joke and ends up as a strap to hang on to.

There is not a beard to be found on the chins of any of the men of his maternal family, reaching back all the way, no doubt, to the time when Raven created everything (apart from the sun, which he stole). Berko Shemets is observant, but in his own way and for his own reasons. He is a minotaur, and the world of Jews is his labyrinth.

" Mazel tov, Berko. " Landsman's congratulations are so ironic that they are heartfelt, and they are so heartfelt that they can only come off as insincere.

Berko has been staring at the dog with increasing fixity. Abruptly, he gets up and goes over to the stage. He clomps up the three wooden steps and stands looking down at Hershel. Then he holds out his hand to be sniffed. The dog clambers back into a sitting position and reads with his nose the transcript of the back of Berko's hand, babies and waffles and the interior of a 1971 Super Sport. Berko crouches heavily beside the dog and unhooks the clasp of the leash from the collar. He takes hold of the dog's head in his massive hands and looks into the dog's eyes. " Enough already, " he says, " He isn't coming. "

The dog regards Berko as if sincerely interested in this bit of news. Then he lurches to his hind legs and hobbles over to the steps and tumbles carefully down them. Toenails clacking, he crosses the concrete floor to the table where Landsman sits and looks up as if for comfirmation.

"That's the straight emes, Hershel," Landsman tells the dog, " They used dental records."

The dog appears to consider this; then, much to Landsman's surprise, he walks over to the front door. Berko gives Landsman a look of reprimand: What did I tell you? He darts a glance towards the beaded curtain, then slides back the bolt, turns the key, and opens the door. The dog trots right out as if he has pressing business elsewhere.

Before they can stand up or try to settle things with Mrs. Kalushiner, there is a scratching at the front door and then a long, low moan. The sound is human and forlon, and it makes the hair on Landsman's nape stand erect. He goes to the front door and lets in the dog, who climbs back up onto the stage to the place where he has worn away the paint on the floorboards, and stis, ears raised to catch the sounds of a vanished horn, waiting patiently for the leash to be restored.

" I resign, " says Velvel. He takes off his glasses, slips them into his pocket, and stands up. He forgot an appointment. He's late for work. His mother is calling him on the ultrasonic frequency reserved by the government for Jewish mothers in the event of lunch.

The old man emits another horrible reptilian croak, one that nobody understands. He writes, then slides the notepad across to his great-nephew.

" Man makes plans, " the kid reads, " And God laughs. "

Men tend to cry, in Landsman's experience, when they have been living for a long time with a sense of rightness and safety, and then they realize that all along, just under their boots, lay the abyss. That is part of the policeman's job, to jerk back the pretty carpet that covers over the deep jagged hole in the floor.

They started out, back in the Ukraine, black hats like all the other black hats, scorning and keeping their distance from the trash and hoo-hah of the secular world, inside their imaginary ghetto wall of ritual and faith. Then the entire sect was burned in the fires of the Destruction, down to a hard, dense core of something blacker than any hat. What was left of the ninth Verbover rebbe emerged from those fires with eleven disciples and, among his family, only the sixth of his eight daughters. He rose into the air like a charred scrap of paper and blew to this narrow strip between the Baranof Mountains and the end of the wolrd. And here he found a way to remake the old-style black-hat detachment. He carried its logic to its logical end, the way evil geniuses do in cheap novels. He built a criminal empire that profited on the meaningless tohubohu beyond the theoretical walls, on beings so flawed, corrupted, and hopeless of redemption that only cosmic courtesy led the Verbovers even to consider them human at all.

That's how it goes for Berko Shemets in the District of Sitka when he breaks out his hammer and goes Indian. Fifty years of movie scalpings and whistling arrows and burning Conestogas have their effect on people's minds. And hten sheer incongruity does the rest.

The Verbovers, with their Talmudic grasp of systems have broked or rigged many mechanisms of control. But to have figured a way to gaff the entire INS like a Coke machine with a dollar on a string?

Landsman has put a lot of work into the avoidance of having to understand concepts like that of the eruv, but he knows that its a typical Jewish ritual dodge, a scam run on God, that controlling motherfucker. It has something to do with pretending that telephone poles are doorposts, and that the wires are lintels. You can tie off an area using poles and strings and call it an eruv, then pretend on the Sabbath that this eruv you've drawn -- in the case of Zimbalist and his crew, it's pretty much the whole District -- is your house. That ways you can get around the Sabbath ban on carrying in a public place, and walk to shul with a couple of Alka-Seltzers in your pocket, and it isn't a sin. Given enough string and enough poles, and with a little creative use of existing walls, fences, cliffs, and rivers, you could tie a circle around pretty much any place and call it an eruv.

Zimbalist takes the vodka without a word and knocks it down in one shot. "I taught that boy to play chess," he says. " When that man was a body, I mean. Before he grey up. I'm sorry, I'm not making sense." But then he doesn't say anything, he just sits there watching the papiros burn down. He peers out from his cavernous eyeholes at Berko, then steals a cardplayer peek at Landsman. He's recovering from the shock now. Trying to map the situation, the lines he cannot cross, the doorways that he mustn't step through on peril of his soul.

Through his wires and strings, the boundary maven felt every whisper and rumor the way a spider hears in its feet the thrashing of a fly.

The boundary maven's faith in faithlessness had been shaken by a simple quest -- How is she? -- by a dozen words of blessing, by a simple bishop move that seemed to imply a chess beyond the chess that Zimbalist knew. It was as repayment for the miracle that Zimbalist had arranged the secret match between Mendel and Melekh Gaystik, king of the Cafe Einstein and future champion of the world. Three games in the back room of a shop on Ringelblum Avenue, with the boy winning two out of three. When this act of subterfuge was uncovered -- and not the other; no one else ever learned of the affari -- the visits between Zimbalist and Mendel Shpilman were broken off. After that, he and Mendel never shared another hour at the board.

" That's what comes from giving out blessings, " says Zimbalist the boundary maven. " But it took Mendel Shpilman a long time to figure that out. "

The air seems to shatter like a world of tiny windows with a tinkling sound. And Landsmen feels something that makes him want to put a hand to the back of his neck. He is a dealer in entropy and a disbeliever by trade and inclination. To Landsman, heaving is kitsch, God a word, and the soul, at most, a charge on your battery. But in the three-second lull that follows Zimbalist's crying out the name ofthe rebbe's lost son, Landsman has the feeling that something comes fluttering amont them. Dipping down over the crowd of men, brushing them with its wing. Maybe it's just the knowledge, leaping from man to man, of why these two homicide detectives must have come at this hours. Or maybe it's the old power to conjure of a name in which their fondest hope once resided. Or maybe Landsman just needs a good night's sleep in a hotel with no dead Jews in it.

He knows what a hard thing it can be to have fathered a heroin addict. He has seen this kind of coldness before. But something rankles him about these Jews who tear their lapels and sit shiva for living children. It seems to Landsman to make a mockery of both the living and the dead.

Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap.

He sets down the paper, and Landsman has to wonder how he ever could have seen anything in the rebbe's eyes but ten thousand miles of frozen sea. Landsman is shocked, knocked overboard into that cold water. To keep himself afloat, he clings to the ballast of his cynicism.

Landsman watches the progress of Elijah the Prophet through the snowstorm and plans his own death. This is a fourth strategy he has evolved to cheer himself when he's going down the drain. But of course he had to be careful not to overdo it.

You have to look to Jews like Bina Gelbfish, Landsman thinks, to explain the wide range and persistence of the race. Jews who carry their homes in an old cowhide bag, on the back of a camel, in the bubble of air at the center of their brains. Jews who land on their feet, hit the ground running, ride out the vicissitudes and make the best of what falls to hand, from Egypt to Babylon, from Minsk Gubernya to the District of Sitka. Methodical, organized, persistent, resourceful, prepared. Berko is right: Bina would flourish in any precinct house in the world. A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.

A girl with a healthy appetite, that was his mother's first recorded statement on the subject of Bina Gelbfish twenty years ago. Like most of his mother's compliments, it was convertible to an insult when needed.

Everybody loves it when the prodigal returns, except for the guy that's been sleeping in his pajamas.

Bina never stopped wanting to redeem the world. She just let the world she was trying to redeem get smaller and smaller until, at one point, it could be bounded in the hat of a hopeless policeman. " It's all talking chickens to me now. "

Once Bina Gelbfish believed in Meyer Landsman. Or she believed, from the moment she met him, that there was a sense in that meeting, that some detectable intention lay behind their marriage. They were twisted like a pair of chromosomes, of course they were, but where Landsman saw in that twisting together only a tangle, a chance snarling of lines, Bina saw the hand of the Maker of Knots. And for her faith, Landsman repaid her with his faith in Nothing itself.

" No, you don't tell her nothing. " Benito grins. " Now she your boss. "

" She was always my boss, " Landsman says. " Now it's just official. "

Rivalries, grudges, sectarian disputes, mutual excommunications, they've been laid aside for a day so that everyone can mourn with due passion a Jew was was forgotten by them until last Friday night. Not even a Jew -- the shello of a Jew, thinned to transparency around the hard void of a twenty year junk habit. Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve. Now the pious of the Sitka District have pinpointed the site of their collective unworthiness and gather in the rain to lay it in the ground.

" You can't get near her, And even if you can, you still can't." He was making a nice policeman-like distinction between the things that balls could accomplish and those that the breakers of balls would never permit.

Over the last hour, the crowd has swollen, bunching up around the cemetary gates. Jiggling, shifting, prone to sudden mass lurches, animated by the Brownian motion of collective woe. They smell of lamentation, these Jews, long underwear, tobacco, smoke on wet overcoats, mud. They're praying like they're going to faint, fainting like it's a kind of observance. Weeping women cling to each other and break open their throats. They aren't mourning Mendel Shpilman, they can't be. It's something else they feel has gone out of the owrld, the shadow of a shadow, the hope of a hope. The half-island they have come to love as home is being taken from them. They are like goldfish in a bag, about to be dumped back into the big black lake of Diaspora. But that's too much to think about. So instead, they lament the loss of a lucky break they never got, a chance that was no chance at all, a king who was never going to come in the first place, even without a jacketed slug in the brainpan.

Of course, the Shtrakenzer bride, though perfect, was not suitable; Mrs. Shpilman knew that. Long before the maid came to say that nobody could find Mendel, that he had disappeared sometime in the course of the night, Mrs. Shpilman had known that no degree of accomplishment, beauty, or fire in a girl would ever suit her son. But there was always a shortfall, wasn't there? Between the match that the Holy One, blessed be He, envisioned and the reality of the situation under the chuppah. Between commandment and observance, heaven and earth, husband and wife, Zion and Jew. They called that shortfall "The World". Only when Messiah came would the breach be closed, all separations, distinctions, and distances collapsed. Until then, thanks be unto His Name, sparks, bright sparks, might leap across the gap, as between electric poles. And we must be grateful for their momentary light.

Mrs. Shpilman had taken steps to protect Mendel, setting hours and conditions. But the boy had a gift. And it was in the nature of a gift that it be endlessly given.

Mrs. Shpilman sat in the Louis XIV chair for a long time, hours, years. A coldness filled her, an icy disgust for creation, for God and His misbegotten works. At first theh orror she felt seemed to bear upon her son and the sin that he was refusing to surrender, but then it turned into a horror for herself. She considered the crimes and hurts that had been committed to her benefit, and all of that evil only a drop of water in a great black sea. An awful place, this sea, the gulf between the Intention and the Act that people call " the world. " Mendel's flight was not a refusal to surrender; it was a surrender. The Tzaddik Ha-Dor was tendering his resignation. He could not be what the world and its Jews, in the rain with their heartaches and their umbrellas, wanted him to be, what his mother and father wanted him to be. He could not even be what he wanted to be. She hoped -- sitting there, she prayed -- that one day, at least, he might find a way to be what he was.

As soon as the prayer flew upward from her heart, she missed her son. She longed for her son. She reproached herself bitterly for having sent Mendel away without first finding out where he was staying, where he would go, how she could see him or hear his voice from time to time. Then she opened the hands he had enfolded a last time in his, and found, curled in her right palm, a tiny length of string.

" It's not much, " Landsman says, rain pattering the brim of his hat. " But it's home. "

" No, it isn't, " Batsheva Shpilman says. " But I'm sure it makes it easier for you to think so. "

Landsman feels a numbness enter his limbs, a welcome numbness, a sense of doom that is indistinguishable from peacefulness, like the bite of a predator snake that prefers to swallow its victims alive and tranquil.

" All right. " Doctor Rau turns his plump face to Landsman. The irises of his eyes are like cast iron. " Based on my examiation, I would guess that you are going through alcoholic withdrawal, Detective Landsman. "

" Doctor, " he says, " from one man with X-ray eyeballs to another, I respect your keenness, but tell me, please, if the country of India were being cancelled, and in two months, along with everyone you loved, you were going to be tossed into the jaws of the wolf with nowhere to go and no one to give a fuck, and half the world have just spent the past thousand years trying to kill Hindus, don't you think you might take up drinking? "

" In my experience, Detective Landsman, if I may, the people who worry about losing their edge, often they fail to see they already lost the blade a long time ago. "

Once he had been fitted for the suit of the Tzaddik Ha-Dor and then decided that it was a straitjacket.

It was hatred at first sight, the kind of grand romantic hatred that in thirteen-year-old boys is indistinguishable from or the nearest they can get to love.

Landsman knows Hebrew when he hears it. But the Hebrew he knows is the traditional brand, the one his ancestors carried with them through the millennia of their European exile, oily and salty as a piece of fish smoked to preserve it, its flesh flavored strongly by Yiddish. That kind of Hebrew is never employed for human conversation. It's only for talking to God. If it was Hebrew that Landsman heard at Peril Strait, it was not the old salt-herring tongue but some spiky dialect, a language of alkali and rocks. It sounds to him like the Hebrew brought over by the Zionists after 1948. Those hard desert Jews tried fiercely to hold on to it in their exile but, as with the German Jews before them, got overwhelmed by the teeming tumult of Yiddish, and by the painful association of their language with recent failure and disaster. As far as Landsman knows, that kind of Hebrew is extinct except among a few last holdouts meeting annually in lonely halls.

Landsman runs through his mental docket of smuggler kings and gray-market moguls, gurus of minor cults. Men with influence, connections, unlimited funds. None of them could have pulled off something like this, not even Heskel Shpilman or Anatoly Moskowits the Wild Beast. No matter how powerful, every Jew in the District is tethered by the leash of 1948. His kingdom is bound in its nutshell. His sky is a painted dome, his horizon an electrified fence. He has the flight and knows the freedom only of a balloon on a string.

Uncle Hertz puts his palms together and bows. Like a true hermit, he takes his duties as a host very seriously.

The old man tells Landsman to go into the house, and Landsman obeys him, which leaves Hertz standing there face to face with his son. Landsman watches, an interested party like all Jewish men from the moment that Abraham got Isaac to lie down on that mountaintop and bare his pulsing rib cage to the sky.

As he contemplates the bowl of meatballs, his body emits a weary sound, a Yiddish sound, halfway between a belch and a lamentation.

Landsman gives Berko a look that is meant to remind him not of his age and station in life but of the manifest uncoolness of bickering with one's relatives. It's an old and well-worn facial expression dating from the time of Berko's first strife-filled years with the Landsmans. It never takes longer than a few minutes, whenever they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That's what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.

Uncle Hertz speaks then, or rather the wind emerges from his lungs through the gates of his teeth in a way that resembles human speech. He looks down at his lap and makes the sound again, and Landsman realizes that he's saying he's sorry. Speaking a language in which he has never been schooled.

" Every damn day of my life, I get up in the morning and put this shit on and pretend to be somehting I'm not. Something I'll never be. For you . "

" I never asked you to observe the religion, " the old man says, not looking up. " I don't think I ever put any kind of " --

" It has nothing to do with religion , " Berko says, " It has everything to do, God damn it, with fathers . "

It comes through the mother, of course, one's being or not being a Jew. But Berko knows that. He's known it since the day he moved to Sitka. He sees it everytime he looks into a mirror.

" It's all nonsense, " the old man goes on, a little mumbly, half to himself. " A slave religion. Tying yourself up. Bondage gear! I've never worn that nonsense in my life. "

" No? " Berko says.

It catches Landsman off guard, how quick and how massive is the transfer of Berko Shemets from he doorway of the cabin to the dining table. Before Landsman can quite understand what is happening, Berko has jerked the ritual undergarment down over the old mans' head.

" You never wore one, eh? " Berko says. " You never fucking wore one! Try mine! Try mine, you prick! "

" Stop. " Landsman goes to the rescue of the man whose addiction to tactics of sacrifice led, maybe not predictable but directly, to the death of Laurie Jo Bear.

Every Messiah fails , writes Litvak, the moment he tries to redeem himself.

" A woman , " said the doctor, shifting his queenside rook, a move that gave him no advantage that Litvak could see. Dr. Roboy, in litvak's measured view, had a vice common to believers. He was all strategy and no tactics. He was prone to move for the sake of moving, too focused on the goal to bother with the intervening sequence. " Here. In this place. "

Litvak knew that charisma was a real if indefinable quality, a chemical fire that certain half-fortunate men gave off. Like any fire or talent, it was amoral, unconnceted to goodness or wickedness, power or usefulness or strength. If Roboy could get Shpilman up and running again, then Shpilman could inspired and lead not merely a few hundred armed believers or thirty thousand black-hatted hustlers looking for new turf, but an entire lost and wandering nation.

Litvak knocked the cigar from Shpilman's soft hand. The certianty he had felt down on the dock that Shpilman would serve their needs was turned abruptly on its head. A man like Shpilman, a talent like Shpilman's, could never serve anyone; it could only be served, above all by the one who wielded it. No wonder the poor bastard had been hiding from it for so long.

" Fuck what is written, " Landsman says. " You know what?" All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption. "I don't care what is written. I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriachs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag.

He sits down. He lights another cigarette.

" Fuck you, " Landsman concludes. " And fuck Jesus too, he was a pussy. "

Half-blind and cold in his bones, he trudges along Monastir Street to Berlevi Street, then over to Max Nordau Street, with a kink in his back and an ache in his head and a sharp throbbing pain in his dignity. The space recently occupied by his mind hisses like the fog in his ears, hums like a bank of fluorescent tubes. He feels that he suffers from tinnitus of the soul.

At some point the humming that has plagued Landsman and his people since the dawn of time, which some in their foolishness have mistaken for the voice of God, gets trapped in the windows of room 505 like sunlight in the heart of an iceberg.

The reason you never developed at chess, Meyerle, is because you don't hate to lose badly enough.

For days Landsman has been thinking that he missed his chance with Mendel Shpilman, that in their exile at the Hotel Zamenhof, without even realizing, he blew his one shot at something like redemption. But there is no Messiah of Sitka. Landsman has no home, no future, no fat but Bina. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international fratenity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue.

I liked the way the Jewish religion seemed, on the whole, to have devoted so much energy and art to finding loopholes in it's own crazy laws; I like what this seemed to me to imply about it's attitude toward God, that dictatorial and arbitrary old fuck with his curses and his fiats and his yen for the smell of burnt shoulder meat.

Money doesn't make you happy, but it lets you be unhappy for a while longer.

Focus on other people's troubles. Not your own. That is the relief.

It was a market mirage fueled by cocaine and quantitative easing.

The key of history is in the lock - keep turning, at any cost?

In her green eyes you see a mixture of truth and self-satire. Decades of guilt and pride.

She prefers a fantasy world -- an infraculture with its own dress code and vernacular. It is an illusion, I'm afraid. There is no refuge from the supraculture. One may dye their hair green and wear their grandma's coat all they want. Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead...

A conglomerate the size of Wild Pines is like a shark -- if it stops moving and growing it will die. Then what becomes of those 72,000 employees who depend on Wild Pines for their pay cheques.

I like theory more than story. Outward movement, not vortices.

When power calls you, you come. But power itself is a fragile trick of perception.

The moralintern are a fact. I try not to have an opinion on facts -- until they change. And it doesn't look like that's about to happen.

It's always a challenge to describe the person you know best in the world.

But my own code serves me well. If my code starts failing -- a code can fail a man as well as a man can fail a code -- then I will have to submit to a new one.

There are no non corrupt systems anyway. And moralism is the most corrupt of them all anyway.

There he stands. Proud, rigid, and alone, like a cracking marble statue.

0.000% of communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself 'sad'. He is starting to suspect that Kras Masov "fucked him over" personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.

Rhetoric: "At least they're interesting. Each one has a process just like yours, running in the space between their ears, full of secrets."

Perception: "People are beautiful. Statuesque. Parodies and tragedies of themselves. A great democracy of creatures..."

Our things are a part of our life world. They're made with human sweat and they share human history. We should care about them as we care about humans, to some extent at least.

Congrats -- you're sober. It will take a while for your body to remember how to metabolize anything that isn't sugar from alcohol, so you're going to be pretty ravenous soon. Eat plenty. You can expect your coordination and balance to improve in a couple of weeks. In two months, you might start sleeping like a normal person. Full recovery will take years, though. It'll be depressing. And it'll be boring. Don't expect any rewards of handclaps. This is how normal people are all the time.

Real art is dense and difficult. If it didn't feel like you had to wrestle a suicidal bear to get through it, you weren't really reading.

It's in a way, admirable how quickly he composes himself after such a blow. This man digs authority. Even when it's bullying him.

Every day, the wind shifts the reeds and whatever was left in them: tambourines and condom wrappers, plastic and glass bottles, the smell of decay.

A chance to get in contact with the future. A beautiful, terrible thought.

Have you noticed the quiet? Every so often, you might hear a gunshot pierce the air somewhere in Jamrock. But in Martinaise? No gunshots, no sirens. The people are languishing in boredom and complacency. This place is a sepulcher. We'll paint it red. We bring the raucous -- you bring the sirens.

A laughing skull. Death hilarious. This is gonna be baaaad...

Mercenary tattoos -- for all the boys looking for an adventure -- a blood splatter on the seas.

This is an Oranjese Map of the Waterways -- a sailor's tattoo worn by wayfarers of the Dolorian century, over 300 years ago. The sailors would mark their bodies to map their travels.

The sailor's soul would use it to fly back home if they should die abroad. This is a sort of... contraption. To be reeled back in by. The silver cord, as they would call it.

"I've spoken to him. For now the soul is fastened inside his corpse".

That is precisely what the sailors feared when they drew these maps. A fear of drowning -- within one's own corpse.

I wield an army of drunks. Do not underestimate the effect of such a force if it is pointed in the right direction.

Winter, slow to let go of Revachol, flecks some more wet snow from above. The snow falls lazily, making the beach sand paler still, mixing with the rust-colored sewage run-off. And to think -- it seemed as though it were already spring.

TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE

ONLY IN THE NEXT WORLD -- FOR NEW PEOPLE

IT'S TOO LATE FOR US

WREAK HAVOC ON THE MIDDLE CLASS

The grave's coming for your little 'identity' sooner than you think, homes.

Might even be nice to have some company... He said that in spite of himself. He's more attached to the human than he'd like to think.

Apres Le Monde - Le Gris; Apres Le Gris - Le Monde De Nouveau (After the world, the pale. After the pale, the world again).

Listen, you Moralintern lackeys. You're a mob, enforcing the unlawful privatization of Revachol. Twenty fat men in the Occident are stealing it all -- and you're their body guards.

You cannot make out any of his details, but you do feel the overwhelming prescence of... capital. The feeling causes all the hairs of your body to stand at attention like soldiers preparing for review.

No One likes foreign mercenaries. The leftists hate them, the fascists hate them, even the moralists think they're bad taste.

"RACISTS ARE GENERALLY NOT VERY GOOD EXAMPLES OF THEIR RACE". He gestures to the lorryman down the street. "I AM NOT LIKE THEM. I AM CRANIOMETRIC PERFECTION. I HAVE TAKEN THE TROUBLE TO PERMENANTLY DRAW A PHRENOLOGICAL GRID ON MY SKULL AND FEATURES. THIS SHOULD DISPEL ANY DOUBT.".

The people who made this world intended it to be better for you, but they failed. It is easier to live in their failure with this by your side.

Free from self awareness. No deliberation, only execution. With his reel-to-reel mixer blasting the anthem of a future that will never come, the young man observes your moves for a second.

On the coast of the Martinaise isle, in a small weather-beaten stave church build 380 years ago by settlers from the Occident, most likely to guard against an anomaly at its centre, an officer of the RCM is contorting his body into idiotically rigid shapes, as he invents the future of dance music... it's the hardest anyone has ever danced.

I AM LA REVACHOILIERE. I AM THE CITY. I AM A FRAGMENT OF THE WORLD SPIRIT, THE GENIUS LOCI OF REVACHOL.

MY HEART IS A WIND CORRIDOR. THE BOTTOM OF MY AIR IS RED. I HAVE A HUNDRED THOUSAND LUMINOUS ARMS.

COME MORNING, I CARRY INDUSTRIAL DUST AND LET IT SETTLE ON TREE LEAVES. I SHAKE THE DUST FROM THOSE LEAVES AND ONTO YOUR COAT.

I'VE SEEN YOU, I'VE SEEN YOU. I'VE SEEN YOU WITH HER -- AND I'VE SEEN YOU WITHOUT HER. I'VE SEEN YOU ON THE CRESCENT OF THE HILL.

THE MODULATIONS OF MY VOICE ARE NOTED DOWN WITH THERMOMETERS AND BAROMETERS. YOU FEEL ME IN YOUR NOSTRILS, ON THE LITTLE HAIRS ON THE BACK OF YOUR NECK.

I ALSO RESIDE IN YOUR LUNGS AND VESTIGIAL ORGANS. EVERYWHERE THERE IS SPACE.

YOU ARE AN AGENT OF THE CITIZENS MILITIA. AGENTES IN REBUS, WHEN YOU WEAR YOUR COAT, YOU WEAR MY SOUL.

YOU MOVE THROUGH MY STREETS FREELY, IN MOTOR CARRIAGES AND ON FOOT. YOU HAVE ACCESS TO HIDDEN PLACES. YOU ALSO CIRCULATE AMONG THOSE WHO ARE HIDDEN.

I NEED YOU. YOU CAN KEEP ME ON THIS EARTH. BE VIGILANT. I LOVE YOU.

It's what this Soona person is looking for, and trying to measure. It'll be fruitless though. She won't be able to measure it. People like that always want to measure everything, all those things they really can't. You can't measure shit like this... it's not like... with substance.

I saw some piglets suckling their dead mother. After a short while they shuddered and went away. They had sensed that she could no longer see them and that she wasn't like them any more. What they loved in their mother wasn't her body, but whatever it was that made her body live.

You shouldn't listen to what people say, you should listen to what they are.

There is a difference between narcotics and group elation. One kills you, the other does not.

The world spirit does not have a body. It has organs. Hard core is an organ of the world spirit. This Arno van Eyck track is an organ. The carpentry and glass-cutting that built this house are also organs. She's a thief if you ask me. An organ thief.

Humanism leads to eating sugar and pigs. Humanism was invented to mass produce billions of humans. Billions of humans can mass produce hundreds of billions of pigs. She liked games. Her legacy, the thing we're living, isn't real life. It's a strategy for some kind of victory. Against a long dead opponent.

"What are you suspicious of?" "Oh, it'd be easier to list stuff I'm not suspicious of. I'm not suspicious of sound and colour. Mechanics and chemistry also have a trueness about them. Most anything else decieves. Wants to steal your life away."

"What's suspicious about pork and wheat?" "It's our only shit. We should make better use of not being animals -- or cereal grains -- ourselves. Having food is a means to an end. But the left never talks about the end, only the means. Caps are likewise suckers, constantly sleepless in worry."

"Their movement's only concern is producing enough pig and wheat for everyone -- the end goal of humanity. The original mistake was assuming that words have more being than bodies. That's what lead us astray, far from our true lives. But we may yet find a way back."

You mentioned true life. What would that be like?

"A life is true if it's free from fear and internal division among oneself. And others -- mankind has seeds of greatness in it. A germinal will come, a return to trueness. It will be hard core. Beats and bright lights will shatter falsehoods. Never impulses for the collective body. We are very much alike in basic structure. A hard enough beat would awaken everyone to a truer calling -- in unity! Hard core is utmost dedication. Thoughts from the spinal cord. It's a potent superlative as well. Maybe you're confused because you're being too specific about it? Try consulting with your spinal cord... like before, when you pulled those primal dance moves. I'm sure the world was glad to see them again after all that time."

What is all of this? The scent, the sound, the air? This world of matter and its pale antipode. The camera of her mind glides over the surface of the water. There is a term of endearment they coined for it. In the Dolorian century, when humanity was high on this world, discovering more and more of it -- these archipelagos included. Elysium. We used to think it was a sphere, but that is beginning to look less and less likely by the day. Between the big three scientific contributors, they're piercing together a dark grey corona. Pale covers 72% of the surface. There are gray flares and prominences, even arcs above entire isolas... The images are blurry, but if there was a sphere in there it certainly looks like it fractured a long time ago. They say there is a rarefied envelope of matter surrounding the darkened disc of our planet. Or, to speak more plainly, imagine vast swathes of land disrupted by nothingness. It's like the corwning of the world. It's insane. Very disco. You'd love it.

"Detective Du Bois..." He bows lightly. "It was downright tragic. Now let's go". To him, being a cop in the RCM was truly expressed in that performance.

There it is again -- the scent of apricots, with a touch of cinnamon. Smells like the end of some distant summer. The surface of another planet, or some ancient temple. The sun sets into the sea, but the water does not boil. Instead it turns to liquid gold. For a moment, the world's store of precious metals seems to increase dramatically, and you are rich... Bitter, citrus, sweet, it seems to grow stronger, like a glow, withe very breath you take... until a blossom of skin and flower petals erupts behind your closed eyes. Made of toffee, cream, and distance.

This is a person coming to terms with a new reality. One where they are wrong. It's not easy.

One leader and one follower, the most ancient power dynamic.

Econoclards claim to be communists, but in reality they're just liberals with hard-ons for spreadsheets. The Gottwald school look like communists, they talk like communists, but scratch the patina and you'll see beneath that they're just depressed liberals who've read too many books.

"And what about the liberals? Are they liberals, too?" "Of course not. The only people who call themselves liberals are mouth-foaming reactionaries." "Basically indistinguishable from fascists. You'd need an x-ray machine to tell the difference"

Are they being sarcastic? You feel like you're caught in some elaborate joke labyrinth, but it's impossible to see your way through. It's always that way. Beneath the crust of irony there's a molten sincerity that threatens to erupt forth... you may witness it yet.

"It's heavier than I was expecting." The rifle rests in his open palms. Its position reminds you of something... The attitude of a priest bearing one of the holy relics of his faith. Though it is long out-of-service, its power is evident to him.

Soon you're debating whether a de-commodified spirituality is even possible under communism... Probably not, is the answer. Which isn't to say it isn't sometimes still useful.

This limbed and headed machine of pain and undignified suffering is grinding to a halt. Tired of walking the desert, it doesn't want to think anymore.

We prefer difficult books. Books that might destroy you, if you don't destroy them first.

"What is Oranjese literature about?" "Fear of failure, fear of death. How it sucks to be Oranjese. All national literatures are -- only the name of the nation changes". If that's true, then Revacholian lit would fit you like a glove.

Something is bad in my head. In the past. That's where it always comes from, isn't it? From the head -- and from the past.

"Yeah, I don't wanna say that shit about him. Tell them it's not my style. They'll have to, you know -- if they want to jazz up the charges -- they'll have to get someone more..." She searches for the word, then shrugs. "Rapeable". "Could that be why they lynched him? Jealousy?" "I hope not". A pause. "Actually, I know that's not the reason. I'm careful about that kind of thing. Not crossing the wires, you know. But that's probably where they got the rape idea." "What do you mean?" "Men like that? I don't know". Another pause. "It's the way their imaginations work". I suspect it's what they'd like to do to me."

"It sounds like something happened and you don't want to acknowledge it." "Let me make this 100% clear then, officer. I was not sexually assaulted." She tilts her head. "Would I be as flippant if I had been?"

Empathy: You get the feeling she might be.

Volition: Soft, light brown eyes look back at you, directly into the space between your eye sockets. You see the smoke rise from between her painted red lips. She's beautiful... I have bad news for you. You know these guys?

Suggestion: Who, me?

Authority: Yes, you. He's talking about you, you grovelling sycophant.

Volition: You too.

Authority: Me? Get outta here, I'm solid.

Volition: These guys are compromised. She's got them singing along to her tune. The little beeps and bloops you trust for info -- you can't trust them anymore. I'm sorry I didn't catch it sooner. It takes conscious effort on your part.

You: Which ones exactly are affected?

Volition: There's no way of knowing. At the moment I'm afraid it's best to assume... all of them.

Electrochemistry: Bullshit, man. I ain't compromised.

Volition: Especially that guy. That guy's the most compromised one in here.

Electrochemistry: No fucking way, man, I just want a drag of that sweet Menthol ziggie.

Volition: Really? Quick, tell me what's under her jumpsuit?

Electrochemistry: GLORY. TRUTH. SOFTNESS. PROTECT HER. SHE WANTS YOU.

Volition: I take it back. He's got it pretty bad, but this next guy is on another level entirely...

Suggestion: She likes you. The Crownhead is a boring condom. He's jealous. This is human nature.

You: How did this happen?

Volition: Like it always does -- through subtlety.

You: What Can I do?

Volition: There's nothing you can do about it. You are how you are -- and she is how she is. Things will go as they do.

You: Can't you turn them normal again?

Volition: No.

You: What use is this then?

Volition: It's better to know you are being played than to be played without knowing it, is it not?

You: What is her plan.

Volition: You can't draw a sound conclusion. The one who usually does says...

Logic: She may want to control the information rollout -- not to become a suspect. She may have a past she's escaping, unrelated to this case. You doubt it's something truly insidious.

Volition: See? It's oddly moderate. Probably compromised.

You: Does that mean she's been lying to me?

Volition: I think it's safe to assume: yes. Mr. Thesbian here hasn't been speaking up. If he were, I suspect there would be paeans to her truthfulness. Like this...

Drama: She isth a laedy most fair and juste!

Volition: In his defence -- to reduce him to such inadequecy, she probably had to employ half-truths more often than outright lies.

Rhetoric: That is correct. And ommisions too.

You: Can I trust that guy?

Volition: A little. They're all still of limited use, interpreting things to the best of their ability. Maybe they add flair or something? I wouldn't know. I don't add flair. But when it comes to assessments of character, or factual accuracy they are not to be trusted. Not with her.

You: Can I trust any of them ever again.

Volition: Don't be melodramatic. You can trust them. Just not with her.

Perception: A light green speck, and imperfection, on the outer rim of her right iris. It sparkles...

You: I've been talking to myself long enough. Let's get back to it.

Volition: Don't worry, it's only been four or five seconds. You've got this.

You: "Miss, are you manipulating me?"

The silence broken, she exhales a cloud of smoke and says... "God, no!"

Later...

"He told me --- love did him in."

"That's not funny officer."

Composure: Her voice is like a slash through the air. Her shoulders tense up.

Volition: There. She momentarily lost control over Straight-Back-Guy! It appears she feels guilty.

Later...

Empathy: You sense a little hesitation there -- or maybe even fear? The stress was on the wrong syllable.

Drama: Welcome to the wake-up club, brother.

Volition: (About Kim) This bastion of willpower -- his watchmen have been sleeping too, you can be absolutely certain now. But he's coming around.

Shivers: A free Revachol... There is a low, distant rumble on the motor tract. A great machine, shaking the pillars down south. Electricity runs up your spine.

There is nothing more she can say. The final decision is yours -- you alone stand on the throne of your Mind.

The Return of what exactly? "Of the king? Of the nation? Of communism? Return on investment?" She tilts her head. "I don't know exactly. It's meant to be vague, as promises generally are. But at the same time, I mean -- things can't go on like this forever. Something will give. It always does."

It's an empty vessel, an amphora waiting to be filled. Something always returns from the past -- it's how the future happens. And when it does, many guesses turn out to have been right.

The man does not know the bullet has entered his brain. He never will. Death comes faster than the realization.

A simple hypothesis can be wrong, but it's something to build on.

Evil is when nature and spirit meet in the wrong place.

You see two cold eyes looking at you -- through all the smoke and the panic. And a pistol, raised, aiming at your chest, point blank. Then the man squeezes the trigger. His eyes seem unnaturally bright, shining like stars. Something in the fear must distort him somehow. He is evil. And the end.

I'm pretty sure he did all those things -- and then had to internalize them to keep on living. Until they just... sort of turned into his... What's the word I'm looking for? Persona? "Running joke. I was gonna say running joke."

She said she's heard of you from Jamrock. That you play suspects against each other. Open them up, like cans.

His grip is firm and reassuring. Like holding a piece of unpolished granite. "You should be a cop, Titus." "When are you gonna get it through your dumb head?" He scoffs. "I already am., I just wasn't sure you were".

I'm done thinking about this [Finish Thought].

Volition: That's right. Finish Thought. Just finish it and conveniently go on.

Logic: Don't listen to this guy. The theory was solid. He's just jealous. Move on, it's no use harassing her further.

Horrific Necktie: This is it. I'm gonna hit the ground and burn away now. Most of the people in this yard are gonna die -- if not all. Probably you too It's a COMPLETE DISASTER.

Volition: No Not a disaster. Weave this into the story of you. Walk out of it's ruins. Save those who can be saved -- I'm on your side.

Espirit de Corps: And the lieutenant too. And the men behind your back, drawing their weapons... you can live. You can get out of this.

Suggestion: Brother, you should put me in front of a firing squad. I have no words for how much I failed you.

Everything here reminds me of you, and the horrible times we had. The nights we stayed up fighting for our dying love. I have to wipe it all off me -- and be clean again.

Oh yes, this is real darkness. It's not death, or war, or child molestation. Real darkness has love for a face. The first death is in the heart, Harry.

We communards still hoped and they needed to snuff that hope out.

Men without ideals are only animals.

Traitors. It's better alone. I watched the people of this city turn the lights back on, more and more each year. Ruins, glimmering in the dark, like a fucking merry-go-round. The material base for an uprising has eroded, the working class has betrayed mankind and themselves... There is no flame to fan. There is nothing left -- of the world, of our dreams.

"May the 13th, '08, 44 years ago," he looks north. The horizon was black with Coalition airships. Their petroleum rose to the sky and it looked like... like it formed the clouds. Storm clouds. When they started shelling it was... dark magic. The combined might of international capital, all at once - all the greed and terror in the world - tore in Revachol. It lifted streets from the ground and turned houses into ghosts. The mask of humanity fell from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone — everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the world. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed. And then you see it. As it strangles and beats your friends to death... the sweetest, most courageous people in the world," he's silent for a second. "You see the fear and power in its eyes. Then you know." "What?" "That the bourgeois are not human."

"Well -- here is my theory: What if this is an absolutely normal reaction to the world we're living in? What if this is not a significant anomaly at all, something not to be explained, approached as a defect? Look at the sensory input here" He gestures toward the scenery. "Look at the ruins, the neon, listen to the radio, the multitudes. The people. Live here for forty years... As a police detective, he's like a magnetic reader on the world-tape -- to borrow a known metaphor. Harry's been pushed flat against it. Total input. Hard-wired to the free market... He just needed for it to end."

He's anything but a loser. Although he would like to be seen as one. It's cooler that way.

Under the evening sky the great district turns on its lights: A chessboard of wooden houses, 80,000 living souls inside. Firetraps as far as the eye can see -- from Main Street to Precinct 41 atop the motorway, to Boogie Street forking into the snowswept horizon...

You close your eyes and hear the dogs bark. A lone woman sits by a factory window, dreaming of meteorite strikes. On Rue Saint-Gerome a square bullet slides into a square-shaped chamber. In Old South a man without eyelids smiles. Spring has come. It's time.

Torson? Yes.

Mclaine?

Yes.

Heidelstam?

No.

Vicquemare?

Yes.

Du Bois?

Of course.

"Really?" Nix Gottlieb looks up from the list. "I hear he's unstable.."

"You say that like it's a bad thing", Captain Ptolemy Pryce gestures with a ball point pen. It's dim in the office and the curtains are drawn. "Harry's our man, he'll pull through. When he does, he'll side with the people."

"Understood." Gottlieb returns to the list.

"Minot?"

"Of course."

The road, Hwel felt, had to go somewhere. This geographical fiction has been the death of many people. Roads don't necessarily have to go anywhere, they just have to have somewhere to start.

Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing, over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past.

The theater troubled her. It had a magic of its own, one that didn’t belong to her, one that wasn’t in her control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn’t belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn’t know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better.

"That's just about land," said Granny. "It's not the same as a kingdom. A kingdom is made up of-all sorts of things. Ideas. Loyalties. Memories, It all sort of exists together. And then all these things create some kind of life. Not a body kind of life, more like a living idea. Made up of everything that's alive and what they're thinking. And what the people before them thought.' Magrat reappeared and began to lay the fire with the air of one in a trance. 'I can see you've been thinking about this a lot,' said Nanny, speaking very slowly and carefully. 'And this kingdom wants a better king, is that it?' 'No! That is, yes. Look-' she leaned forward - 'it doesn't have the same kind of likes and dislikes as people, right?' Nanny Ogg leaned back. 'Well, it wouldn't, would it,' she ventured. 'It doesn't care if people are good or bad. I don't think it could even tell, any more than you could tell if an ant was a good ant. But it expects the king to care for it.' 'Yes, but,' said Nanny wretchedly. She was becoming a bit afraid of the gleam in Granny's eye. 'Lots of people have killed each other to become king of Lancre. They've done all kinds of murder.' 'Don't matter! Don't matter!' said Granny, waving her arms. She started counting on her fingers. 'For why,' she said. 'One, kings go round killing each other because it's all part of destiny and such and doesn't count as murder, and two, they killed for the kingdom. That's the important bit. But this new man just wants the power. He hates the kingdom.' 'It's a bit like a dog, really,' said Magrat. Granny looked at her with her mouth open to frame some suitable retort, and then her face softened. 'Very much like,' she said. 'A dog doesn't care if its master's good or bad, just so long as it likes the dog."

Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.

Genuine anger was one of the worlds greatest creative forces. But you had to learn to control it. That didn't mean you let it trickle away. It meant you damned it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.

There was something here, Death thought, that nearly belonged to the gods. Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected in it pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflects the landscape. And yet... and yet... Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from -- hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in. He was fascinated.

Italo Calvino wrote, "Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I Hink I should fly like Perseu into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification."

The distance separating our eyes means there is a different between the view each produces -- thus there is no single, "correct view". Our stereoscopic vision is the creation and integration of two views. Seeing, much like walking on two feet, is a constant negotiation between two distinct sources.

Nothing changed, except the point of view -- which changed everything.

Our literal ways of seeing metaphorically serve to encompass other ways of making meaning and experiencing the world. A dog reads everything it encounters as a time capsule unfolding with rich layers of sensory information from which to discern who's been here, what touched this, how long ago. So armed, dogs access dimensions of experience we can't fathom -- as with flatlanders' "Upwards not Northwards".

The medium we think in defines what we can see. As S. I. Hayakwa described the situation: 'We are the prisoners of ancient orientations imbedded in the languages we have inherited'.

I am thinking, therefore I exist. For Descartes, thinking was everything and thinking meant words -- inner speech. Through this dissection, mind was divorced from the senses... Leaving us disembodied... Afloat in a sea of words.

Every language, Hayakawa suggests, "Leaves work undone for other languages to do."

A picture is worth a thousand words? Perhaps. But because of their distinct structures, there is no direct correspondence between them. A description of an image never actually represents the image. Rather, as Michael Bexandall observes, it is a representation of thinking *about* having seen a picture -- it's already formulated in its own tersm. While image *is*, text is always *about*.

Lakoff and Johnson and Nunez say that our fundamental concepts do not spring from the realm of pure, disembodied reason, but are grounded in our seeing and being in the world. That is, through our everyday perceptual and bodily activatives, we form dynamic image-like structures that enable us to organize and make sense of our experience. Sad is down. Intimacy is closeness. Isolation is apart. Importance is big. Difficulty is a burden. We grab hold of an idea and enclose it within a firm grip.

Reaching across the gap to experience another's way of knowing takes a leap of imagination.

From the novel to the commonplace, it's how we formulate concepts, which Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner explains bringing input from distinct sources together in a third space.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?

Roads go ever on and on,

over rock and over tree,

By caves where never sun has shone,

By streams that never find the sea.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

A middleman's business is to make himself a necessary evil.

When the fear came, it was like a half forgotten friend. Not the cold, rapid mechanism of the dex paranoia, but simple animal fear. He'd lived so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he'd almost forgotten what real fear was.

There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self concisouness, in their awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent.

In the nonspace of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension.

In the alley, the dragon in hand, he approached the blackened nest. It had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt.

He saw the thing the shell of grey paper had concealed.

Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessles, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind's eye, a kind of timelapse photograhpy took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger, forgetting to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing life at his feet.

In the dream, just before he'd drenched the nest with fuel, he'd seen the T-A logo of Tessier Ashpool neatly embossed on its side, as though the wasps themselves had worked there.

He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing, the treasure.

The rage.

For thousands of years men have dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible.

To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to know the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names...

A Turing code's not your name.

Neuromancer.

She'd seen through the sham immortality of cryogenics; unlike Ashpool and the other children -- aside from 3Jane -- she'd refused to stretch her time into a series of warm blinks strung along a chain of winter.

Neuromancer, foremost, was a shout in the night that was the 1980s, is the 1990s, and will be, it seems to me, the decades to come.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.

(Commentary) In every generation, there's room enough in the American popular mind to admit only one science fiction writer. Bradbury, Asimov, "the guy who writes Star Trek / Wars". Gibson transcended that role almost at once. In attaining a cultural summit of another order, he outmaneuvered this cultural narrowcasting in a way that might have been imagined but never predicted by anyone.

(Commentary) All fiction is a personal reinterpretation of a writer's existence during the time the fiction was written. Therefore science fiction has never predicted with accuracy, save through coincidence.

(Commentary) Gibson first apprehended the shape of things to come. He saw the writing on the wall, the blood in the sky, the warning in the entrails... Now lets be Heisenbergian about this. What if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?

(Commentary) Cyberspace was born where the laurel grows lush and verdant; where the dogwoods blossom and the whipperwools cry in the wind whipped limbs of the tulip trees. It was born between the ridges, deep in the glades where streams rush cold along their limestone courses; born high on the mountainside not yet stripmined for coal, atop the long green knobs of mars. The southern highlands, this was once called. We call it Appalapachia.

(Commentary) When the past is always with you, it may well be present. And if it is present, it will be future as well.