September 22, 2006

  • My House; What Lies Beneath, Patricia Kennedy Lawford dies at 82, Real Estate Obsession

    September 10, 2006

    My House; What Lies Beneath

    Let’s say, instead of whatever you’re actually doing, that you’re standing on the little wooden deck of my house. It’s off the kitchen, on the third floor, sort of — it’s hard to count the floors, really, because the house is built on a hill, quite steep, like all San Francisco real estate. It’s pretty precarious if you think about it, and you’re thinking about it, and so you say, ”What’s this house built on?”

    I lean my arms on the railing of the deck. I own this place. I bought it with my own money. It’s not like when I lived in apartments, and something would break and we’d have to call the landlord. Nowadays everything is mine. If something breaks, I’m the guy who has to, you know, make the phone calls until we find a guy to fix it. Actually, I don’t usually make the phone calls myself. But still, the point is, my old landlords are not going to fix this place. The house is mine, and so I know some stuff about it.

    ”There was this woman, Irene Marsh,” I say to you. ”She was married to Mr. John (Jack) Marsh, but he was actually more interested in a woman named Miss Alice Murray. Basically, it was the tale of a wife who lavished all of her love and affection upon a man who repudiated her for another woman of greater charm. It’s a long story, but that’s how Herbert Carr got shot. He was a carpenter.”

    You say something like, ”Did that guy build the house?”

    ”Oh, no,” I say, ”but he ended up in this whole scandal, you see? It’s a mystery, what this whole house is built on. It’s an unknowable mystery.”

    By now you wish that you weren’t on my deck, and that you were just reading about this. But even so, in a magazine about real estate? Shouldn’t this guy know something about his house — like what it’s built on, for instance?

    My house was built in 1907. That’s the only thing I know about my house, really, and I tell it to people all the time. ”It was built in 1907,” I say, pointing at something in the house when we’re walking around. I could be pointing at my CD player. It doesn’t matter what I’m pointing at, because then I make a little joke I always make: ”It was a very popular year to build houses in San Francisco.”

    Everyone chuckles, because in 1906 there was the big earthquake in San Francisco that knocked a lot of stuff down. There’s going to be another big earthquake, everyone keeps telling us. It’s a public awareness campaign telling my wife and me that we should have a whole lot of water in our basement. I went out and bought a lot of big plastic things with water in them, and my wife later reorganized them.

    Perhaps I should really start it this way: I write fiction for a living, and my wife is an illustrator, and these are basically nice ways of saying that we just don’t get anything about one single thing. I mean, I was way ahead of the curve on appreciating the work of Haruki Murakami, and my wife put up our hummingbird feeder, but basically we don’t get anything at all. When something in the actual world goes wrong, my wife and I look at whatever it is, and then we sort of sneak looks at each other. We have no idea whatsoever what is going on. We are both hoping one of our old landlords will come and fix it.

    A few years ago, when my wife reorganized the water bottles in our basement, she stacked them all up in a corner, and over the next few weeks, every so often we would notice that the floor of the basement was a little damp. We thought maybe it was dampness in the air, or because of the rain — we didn’t get it, basically. It was a concern, though, because the floor of our basement was made of cardboard. Every time I explain to someone that the floor of our basement was made of cardboard, they say it couldn’t be so. But I tell you it was cardboard — wet cardboard. After a few weeks we looked in the corner and saw that all of the stacked kegs of water were empty. Stacking them had made them leak or something — I don’t really get it — and now our floor was ruined.

    Our old landlords wouldn’t return phone calls, so we got someone to call a guy who came over to our house. I’ll say that his name was Geronimo, and I told him straight off, ”Geronimo, I know it’s going to cost much more and take much longer than you say it will, but could you estimate how much that really would be?” He told us five minutes and five dollars, and that if we called a painter in we could take care of that big, ugly rusty streak on the side of the house from where we put up the hummingbird feeder. We looked at a bunch of squares that a new basement floor could be made of and chose this really cool thing, sort of a rubber surface with a pattern on it that my wife really liked from a design perspective and I really liked because it reminded me of the floor of an underwater hideout.

    We all got back to work — me making up stuff, my wife drawing whatever popped into her head and Geronimo pounding on things and then explaining very patiently that it was absolutely necessary to pound on things in order to take all the cardboard away and turn our basement into a cool-floored hideout. Geronimo and I didn’t make much conversation, on account of my not knowing, ever, what he was talking about, and also because of the time he asked me what I was listening to in my office and I told him that it was an album by the Aluminum Group that was produced by Jim O’Rourke, who maybe Geronimo had heard of because O’Rourke was pretty big in the avant-garde jazz scene in Chicago, where Geronimo was from, and Geronimo reminded me that it was actually the other guy pounding on the floor who was from Chicago, not him. And then one day he came upstairs and asked me something.

    ”What do you know about the foundation of your house?” he asked me.

    ”I told you,” I said. ”I told you to pretend that I was just a person walking by the house, because that’s how much I would know about anything at all in the house.”

    ”You must know something,” Geronimo said. ”You couldn’t just live in the house without knowing anything.”

    ”The house was built in 1907,” I tried, pointing at my phone.

    ”I think you should see this,” he said, so I followed him downstairs to the basement. He and the guy from Chicago had pulled up the cardboard and I could see what was underneath. Underneath was dirt — a few pieces of wood, and dirt, and in the dirt were some old newspapers. It looked exactly like what I would have thought offhand was underneath every house in the history of houses, but then he handed me one of the newspapers and I saw at once why he wanted me to see it.

    ”Wow,” I said.

    ”Yeah,” Geronimo told me, but I was already getting my wife, who was seven months pregnant with our first child. The newspaper page I was holding — I hope The Times is reprinting it here for you, because it’s beautiful — was from the year my house was built: 1907, a very popular year to build houses in San Francisco. It was the front page, focusing on the scandalous accidental shooting of Herbert Carr by the enraged Mrs. Irene Marsh, who was actually aiming for Miss Alice Murray.

    ”Wow,” my wife said, and read part of the scandal out loud. ”’The tale of a wife who lavished all of her love and affection upon a man who repudiated her for another woman of greater charm.”’

    ”’Both principals in the afternoon drama have figured prominently in the papers on previous occasions,”’ I said, ”’notably when Mrs. Marsh attempted to horsewhip her husband and Miss Murray at the Orpheum a year ago.’ I wonder if that’s the same place we saw Tom Waits perform?”

    ”You don’t get it,” Geronimo said.

    He was giving me the look you are giving me now, on my own porch, because he was right. We didn’t get it. The worst thing about an unknowable mystery, like the foundation of a house or the scandals of years gone by, is that it’s not an unknowable mystery at all. It’s just that you happen not to know what it is. I mean, here’s the thing: apparently a house shouldn’t be built on dirt. Dirt is not the thing that belongs under houses, and so they had to dig up all of the dirt and put it in one of those enormous Dumpsters that appear outside people’s houses. Meanwhile, a bunch of metal things held up the house so it wouldn’t fall down the hill while they were digging up all the dirt, and then they pounded things into other things and poured things out of a cement mixer — it must have been cement, come to think of it — and of course it cost a gazillion dollars and took forever. They weren’t done by the time the baby came out of my wife — and boy, talk about unknowable mysteries. The baby not only got all the dust and noise, but it was old enough to make its preferences known for Kraftwerk and plain yogurt and ”Good Night, Gorilla” before Geronimo was done with us. The baby could walk, practically, before Geronimo walked out of my house for good. And all the while I still didn’t get it. O.K., our house was built on dirt, but I always thought everything was built on dirt. I’m told that if this were actually the case, then everything would fall down, but don’t you basically have to put a house on dirt? Isn’t dirt under everything? No one has been able to answer this for me, so it’s an unknowable mystery, like everything about my house, except for when it was built, and the newspapers have been able to answer that one in black and white: 1907, the year a woman named Irene Marsh tried to shoot her husband John (Jack) Marsh’s mistress, Miss Alice Murray, but shot Herbert Carr instead, and not only is this not an unknowable mystery, but it’s actually interesting.

    ”You know who else would be interested in this?” my wife said, holding up the newspaper. ”Who’s that Californian history guy, real nice guy, we met at that library thing?”

    ”Kenneth Starr,” I said.

    ”No,” my wife said, ”that’s the Clinton prosecutor.”

    ”Your whole house is built on dirt,” Geronimo said. ”You’re really in trouble here.”

    ”Dirt and newspapers,” I reminded him, and tried to think. ”Kevin,” I said. ”Kevin, not Kenneth, Starr.”

    ”Look at how they illustrated it,” my wife said. ”A drawing and a painting and a photograph. We should have this framed.”

    ”Thanks so much for showing us this,” I gushed to Geronimo, who was looking at me and my wife. Probably he was about to try again and tell me why a house can’t be built on dirt, and anyone who heard him — a person walking by the house, for instance — might have learned why that is so. But right now he was just looking at two people who bought a house with their own money and had just learned it was built on dirt with some newspapers in it, and who were looking at newspapers from 1907 in wonder and amazement. I like to think that Geronimo was looking at us in wonder and amazement, too, like we were a mystery hidden deep in the dirt of the earth — something he just didn’t get, something unknowable. nIllustration by Kristin Roskifte

    photographs by Lars Klove for the New York Times# Key September 2006A House Built on a Broken Home

    A scandal-filled issue of The San Francisco Chronicle from Jan. 30, 1907, that was

    found under the author’s basement floor — along with dirt, wood and

    other material unsuitable for anchoring a house to the hills of San Francisco.O.K., our house was built on dirt, but don’t

    you have to put a house on dirt? Isn’t

    dirt under everything? No one has been able

    to answer this for me. Daniel Handler writes novels under his own name and also as Lemony Snicket.# Key September 2006# Key September 2006

     

    Patricia Kennedy Lawford Dies at 82

    Bill Cunningham/The New York Times

    Patrica Kennedy Lawford in 1998.

    September 18, 2006

    Patricia Kennedy Lawford Dies at 82

    Correction Appended: For the Record

    Patricia Kennedy Lawford, who as a sister of President John F. Kennedy had a front row seat to history and forged new links between her brother’s administration and Hollywood through her marriage to the actor Peter Lawford, died yesterday at her home in Manhattan. She was 82 and also had a home in Southampton, N.Y.

    The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Melissa Wagoner, a spokeswoman for Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Mrs. Lawford’s brother.

    Poised as a princess, athletic and lithe, Mrs. Lawford is widely remembered as the Roman Catholic schoolgirl who dismayed her domineering father, Joseph P. Kennedy, the former Ambassador to Britain, by marrying Mr. Lawford, a debonair British actor.

    Patricia Kennedy’s 1954 marriage to Mr. Lawford was the stuff of newsreels; some 3,000 spectators gathered outside St. Thomas More Roman Catholic Church on the Upper East Side.

    The sixth of nine children born to Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Mrs. Lawford, like her siblings, had a well-honed understanding of politics and of the power of appearances. As early as 1946, she campaigned for her brother John during his first run for Congress, organizing highly effective women’s coffees in Boston and Cambridge neighborhoods, and when he ran for President in 1960 she often substituted at events for his pregnant wife, Jacqueline Kennedy.

    The Lawfords strengthened John F. Kennedy’s ties to the show business world of Hollywood and Las Vegas through Mr. Lawford’s association with “The Rat Pack” of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop and Shirley MacLaine.

    Through the years, Mrs. Lawford was close friends with Marilyn Monroe, Tennesee Williams, and Sinatra, for whom she partly named her daughter Victoria Frances.

    In 1966, after 11 years of marriage, Mrs. Lawford became the first Kennedy to file for a divorce. It was a highly publicized break, one that required Mrs. Lawford to establish residency in Idaho in order to circumvent New York’s divorce laws of the time.

    Afterward, Mrs. Lawford and her four children moved to New York, where she took on a busy social schedule, befriended artists and writers and became known as a generous benefactor of the arts. She was a familiar presence at benefit dinners and her patronage would increase the cachet of any fund-raising charity event. Her name still regularly appeared in the society columns of Palm Beach, New York and the Hamptons, where she maintained a residence.

    Patricia Kennedy was born on May 6, 1924, in Brookline, Mass., the fourth daughter of Joseph P. and Rose Kennedy and the granddaughter of John F. Fitzgerald, the popular mayor of Boston who had earlier served in the House of Representatives. Hers was a family that expected women to be graceful and well-rounded while remaining in the background, quietly serving the ambitions of their men. Of the five Kennedy sisters, she was considered the most beautiful and sophisticated, with the aristocratic air of her mother. She was an accomplished athlete but unlike her ambitious siblings, she never caught the family’s legendary fire for competition.

    In her book 1987 book, “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,” Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote that Rose Kennedy was bothered by Patricia’s lack of ambition. “Although she had a good mind, a fine physique and a beautiful face which could easily have led her to excel in school, in sports or in appearance, Rose contended ‘she would never make the effort to achieve distinction’ in any of these areas.”

    Much like her older sister, Kathleen, who made her mother furious by marrying outside her church, Patricia disappointed her parents by marrying Mr. Lawford, a nominal Episcopalian who agreed to raise their childen as Catholics.

    Mrs. Lawford was the only Kennedy to move away from the family’s traditional East Coast settings of Hyannis Port, Palm Beach and New York. She and Mr. Lawford settled into a sprawling mansion in Malibu that was once owned by Louis B. Mayer. The house became a recreation center for other family members, and the President would spend time lounging at his sister’s pool when he was on the West Coast.

    After the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, she was often seen in the company of his widow and their two children. As recently as 1986, she joined Senator Kennedy on an official visit to Chile that was marred by egg-throwing protestors angered by Mr. Kennedy’s criticism of President Augusto Pinochet.

    She devoted her energies to organizations that served the mentally disabled and those helping people with substance abuse problems. She had a close personal appreciation for both causes: her older sister Rosemary was born mildly retarded and was lobotomized at 23, and she, Mr. Lawford and her son Christopher had waged their own battles with drugs and alcohol.

    Her brother Robert, the former attorney general and later senator from New York, was closest to her in age, just 18 months younger. After his assassination in 1968, Mrs. Lawford assembled a privately printed book of reminiscences about him, as John had done before about the oldest brother, Joe, who died in World War II.

    Her book, “That Shining Hour,” was published in 1969. In her introduction, she wrote “This is not a sad book. Bobby was not a sad person. His basic shyness to the outside world gave way to fun, humor and wit whenever he was with the family.”

    In addition to her brother Edward and two of her sisters, Jean Kennedy Smith and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Mrs. Lawford is survived by her son, Christopher, of California, and three daughters, Sydney, of Washington, Robin, of New York, and Victoria Frances, of Washington, and 10 grandchildren.

    Correction: Sept. 19, 2006

    An obituary in some copies yesterday about Patricia Kennedy Lawford, a sister of President John F. Kennedy, misstated the location of her death. It was at her home in Manhattan, not her home in Southampton, N.Y. The article also erroneously included a survivor; her sister Rosemary Kennedy died last year. The obituary also misstated the place of residence of Mrs. Lawford’s son, Christopher. He lives in California, not New York. A full obituary appears today on page B8.


     

    A Passion for Property

    September 7, 2006    
    Lisa Ke
    September 10, 2006
    On the Homefront

    A Passion for Property

    We all know the meaning of home, the longing for a durable habitation — shelter from the storms of life — that is bred into our bones. Home, be it ever so humble or grand, has proverbially been a man’s castle and a woman’s refuge, offering up a haven in a heartless world, an anchor for the restive and the domesticated alike. No wonder that the adorable little alien E.T. wanted ever so badly to get back to it, even though his “home” happened to be around the corner in outer space. Or that Dorothy yearned with all her might to return to the family farmhouse in Kansas. As the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard observed in his book “The Poetics of Space,” the “virtues of shelter are so simple, so deeply rooted in our unconscious,” that houses can be said to stand in for the poetic imagination itself. They serve as the embodiments of our inner life, Bachelard wrote, containers for fancies: “the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”

    Or so at least used to be the case, before our collective relationship with the idea of home changed — gradually at first, as is the way of all such cultural shifts, and then ever more strikingly — into something other than it once was, something charged with an almost sexualized power, suffused with an insatiable quality of appetite. These days, it would appear that the image of home, our own solitary home, no longer suffices to hold our imaginations. Sometime during the past 10 years, beginning around the dot-com boom, we have — whether as studio dwellers or longtime renters, co-op board members or condo subletters, inhabitants of the suburbs or the cities — become, in the phrase of the Edwardian novelist John Galsworthy, men and women of property, both real and theoretical. We have, regardless of our occupations and other interests, been infected with Real Estate Lust, a condition whose symptoms include a compulsive scanning of real estate ads and an incessant discussion of who paid what for how much, as well as a fascination with the size and shape — down to the number of bedrooms, closets and bathroom windows — of apartments and houses that belong to people other than ourselves. We have wandered out when no one was looking to play in fields of ever-greater square footage, pursuing McMansion visions, getting caught up in the mindset not of proprietary homeowners but of acquisitive real estate agents and developers.

    You don’t, I might add, have to be Ronald O. Perelman or some other avatar of “luxury fever” to spend fortunes in time and money on gutting an existing house and planning a new one. My dentist, a hard-working professional as well as a devoted wife and mother of two small children, whom I’ve had cause to visit with alarming frequency in the past few years, has entertained me with tales of demolishing and rebuilding her Brooklyn house — bought 10 years ago but still undergoing the final touches as of August — throughout this period. She speaks familiarly of her architect and her contractor, can expound at length on the differences between satin-nickel finish and stainless steel and is ready to explain at a moment’s notice why she opted for a Thermidor rather than a Sub-Zero refrigerator. Beyond all this, she recently revealed to me her secret desire, if her finances would allow for it, to acquire another house that has come available nearby and go through the whole process again, this time with renters in mind. One day, while I am sitting in the chair waiting for a shot of Novocaine to take effect, I hear the following advertisement come over the soft jazz station that my dentist’s radio is set to: “There’s nothing I like better,” observes a smooth feminine voice against the sound of yelps and splashes, suggestive of a pool filled with happy kids, “than relaxing in my hammock and getting a quick approval on a home-equity loan.”

    For evidence that the buying and selling of homes has become the ultimate postmodern spectator sport — a form of yuppie pornography, a voyeuristic diversion from the quotidian — you need only take a walk along Main Street in Southampton one evening sometime between late May and the beginning of September. On the east side of the street is the Fudge Company, where couples with young children go for frozen yogurt and penny candy; on the west side is Sant Ambroeus, which hawks gelato. If you stroll south on Main Street you can’t help spotting the crowd with ice cream cones milling in front of Engel & Völkers. On view in the window of this local real estate agency are photographs and prices of various properties — including, as of the first weekend in August, a villa in Phuket, Thailand, for 831,450 euros; an estate in nearby Watermill with a six-bedroom house for $7,999,000; and an “English” mansion in the village of Southampton (which means no water views) for $18,500,000 with nine bedrooms and nine full baths. Also up for sale are apartments in Palma de Mallorca (with sea views!), Budapest and Cyprus. There is a murmur among the crowd, a running commentary of surprise or indignation or awe about this or that offering, as if everyone were at least engaged in serious thought about the possibility of acquiring one or another residence. After a while the crowd moves on, having had its fill of the night’s entertainment, and another crowd forms in its place.

    This contemporary obsession with real estate — less a private passion than a public rite of passage — begins disconcertingly young: my 16-year-old daughter is an avid fan of “MTV Cribs,” a reality show that brings you into the domiciles of young music stars and extreme athletes. (The occupants serve as dazed tour guides of their own homes, rather like Jacqueline Kennedy walking the TV cameras through the newly remodeled White House, except for the fact that these showplaces are usually minimally or casually decorated at best, featuring glossy kitchens filled with either no food or junk food and carpeted living expanses outfitted with king-size beds, sectional sofas and humongous plasma screens everywhere.) Thanks to her television habit, my daughter was inducted into the social significance of ZIP codes (“90210″) and the importance of location (“The OC,” “Laguna Beach”) in a way that didn’t hit me until I was much older. And although she is the least snobbish of creatures, she unfailingly points out that her bedroom, fronting as it does on the back wall of another building, is dark even in the daytime. What it lacks, in other words, is a view, but then again so does every other room in my apartment.

    The facts that I myself grew up in a bedroom without a view — a bedroom that I shared with two sisters — and that my parents’ abode was entirely viewless were not realities that occurred to me with any vividness until fairly recently. Then again, I came of age in a time before the real estate bug had bit. When I was growing up, people who owned buildings (or even a single building) seemed slightly questionable if not outright shifty. They were generally treated as being outside the boundaries of the upstanding professions, like the moist-palmed slumlord father (reputed to deal in dirty books as well as unfit buildings) of the girl in my high-school class who always had suspicious wads of cash on her, as if she had been handed someone’s ruthlessly extracted rent money to spend on after-school snacks.

    Then, too, the ins and outs of the recent purchases and sales of homes by friends and strangers weren’t yet considered to be a hot dinnertime topic, nor was the abstract subject of real estate itself invested with potent symbolism for anyone other than Monopoly addicts. Unlike the consumer population portrayed in Michael J. Silverstein and Neil Fiske’s “Trading Up,” a 2003 study of the lure of luxury goods, for whom a home reflects “attitudes about living, raising a family, social interaction, personal style and taste, and accomplishment,” my parents’ choice of residence (a Park Avenue duplex, which sounds more impressive than it was, especially after you factor in an extra room, known as the “study,” for my father, which left two bedrooms for me and my five siblings, one for the boys and the other for the girls) primarily reflected their wish to be near one set of in-laws and an Orthodox synagogue. I’ll never forget how disappointing my friend the writer Anatole Broyard (who, I realize in hindsight, suffered from a precursory case of Real Estate Lust) found my parents’ apartment when he paid me a visit there one Saturday afternoon while I was recuperating from an illness. “Why, this isn’t grand at all,” he announced in his husky voice, having cast an assessing eye around the foyer and living room.

    Although my parents owned their apartment as well as a summer house an hour out of the city in unchic Atlantic Beach, they did not appear to take these as benchmarks of adulthood or signifiers of material security. For the longest time my father was a firm believer that rentals were sufficient for those of his six offspring who lived on their own, with or without spouses and children. His view on this — he would have warmed to the title of Tolstoy’s fable “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” had he been familiar with it — changed only after the rental market exploded in the 80′s, when contributing to the purchase of places for his children and grandchildren to lay their heads seemed like the financially expedient thing to do.

    How, you might be wondering, did “home sweet home” turn into “real estate sweet real estate”? When, that is, did we all turn into versions of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, trained assessors of other people’s private spaces for all their commercial potential? Perhaps it’s not so surprising, given how deeply the roots of our romance with property are embedded in our national character. “Space as resource is a cultural appraisal,” Yi-Fu Tuan, a geographer, notes in his book “Space and Place.” He expatiates on this idea a few sentences later: “Level of aspiration clearly affects one’s sense of spatial adequacy. Aspiration is culturally conditioned.” And he goes on to point out: “Traditional China, for instance, had many small landlords who were content to live off their rents and enjoy their leisure rather than work and invest their income in enlarging their holdings. In capitalist Western societies, aspiration and entrepreneurial spirit have been and are much stronger.”

    In the end, of course, it is not all that strange that the once déclassé and uncompelling business of real estate has become the dominant form of psychic tourism (see how they bathe, eat, carpet their bedrooms, tile their kitchens and grout their tubs), one that has beat out the other standards against which people measure the content and quality of their own lives and the inner lives of others. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the narratives of other people’s lives — the improbable mix of desires and needs that give texture to the generic plot of “he was born, he lived and then he died” — are most accessible to us through their homes. So it turns out that X can’t exist, despite his modest presentation, without a wine cellar; whereas Y, so imperious in other ways, has a bedroom that doubles as an office. It is as if we have come to understand spiritual depth or moral value only when it is written up as an architectural blueprint, expressed in square feet, ceiling heights and the level of fixtures.

    George Sand once said that people could be classified according to whether they aspired to live in a cottage or in a palace. But that was another time, more uncertain in some ways and clearer in others, when the class system was still rigidly intact and people of all classes saw their earthly domains as no more than a temporary address on the way to a final destination. These days, without a strong religious conviction to gird our increasingly buffeted sense of self in an ever more commodified society, our home — whether cottage or palace or something in between — has come to count for too much and may be mistaken for the only structural testament to our having passed this way at all. In this regard, the fixation with property and the unbounded lebensraum (“bigger is better”) impulse that currently informs so much of our attitude toward home might be better understood as a grandiose defense against the apprehension of our own insignificance than as a genuine conviction of our inestimable value. We are no more landlords of our fate than we ever were, much though we may have increased our sense of being overseers of our own — and everyone else’s — earthly estate. These days, when I think of Dorothy or E.T. aching to go home, I envision them opening their front doors just long enough to park their suitcases before they rush to check their local real estate pages — poring over listings of homes that belong to other people and might someday belong to them, certifying that they have made a dent on this imperviously spinning planet we inhabit with borrowed sovereignty and the poignant but necessary illusion of permanence.

    Daphne Merkin is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.

Post a Comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *