A Place of My Own Read Online Free Page A

notion of a room of one’s own—a place of solitude for the individual—is historically speaking a fairly recent invention. But then again, so is the self, or at least the self as we’ve come to think of it, an individual with a rich interior life. Dipping recently into a multi-volume history of private life edited by Philippe Ariès, I was fascinated to learn how the room of one’s own (specifically, the private study located off the master bedroom) and the modern sense of the individual emerged at more or less the same moment during the Renaissance. Apparently this is no accident: The new space and the new self actually helped give shape to one another. It appears there is a kind of reciprocity between interiors and interiority.
    The room of one’s own that Woolf and Bachelard and the French historians all talked about as necessary to the interior life was located firmly within the confines of a larger house, whether it was an attic nook, a locked room, or a study off the master bedroom. I shared that dream, as far as it went. But none of these images quite squared with my own, which featured not only four walls but also a roof and several windows filled with views of the woods and fields. Not just a room, it was a building of my own I wanted, an outpost of solitude pitched somewhere in the landscape rather than in the house. And so I began to wonder (not one to leave any such thing unexamined) where in the world could that part of the dream have come from? Who, in other words, put a roof on it?
     
    The deepest roots of such a dream are invariably obscure, a tangle of memories and circumstances, things read in books and pictures glimpsed in magazines. But the simplest answer to that question is an architect by the name of Charles R. Myer, an old friend from my college days whose off-hand suggestion set this whole project in motion. Though that was the very last thing I would have expected at the time, since I had dismissed the suggestion out of hand, deeming it tactless and quite possibly insane.
    It was Charlie Myer who’d helped us renovate our tiny bungalow in the northwest corner of Connecticut, where most of this story takes place. It is, or at least it was, a resolutely nondescript clapboard house built in the 1930s from a Sears, Roebuck mail-order kit by a farmer named Matyas. The house is tucked into a roadside corner of an obstreperous wedge of land that climbs and leaps up the rocky hillside behind it like an unwieldy green kite. Not surprisingly, this land eventually defeated the farmer, but in the years since we’d moved in and begun to reclaim the remaining few acres of his falling-down dairy farm from the forest’s encroachment, we’d grown unreasonably attached to the place. I say “unreasonably” because any truly sensible person would have moved rather than attempt to rescue a house as ordinary and unsound as this one.
    I mention all this because the beginning of this story—the inception of my building—takes place in the midst of this renovation, at a second-story bedroom window that looks back toward the hillside. It was in April, I believe, and the renovation of the house was at long last approaching completion, after a year so emotionally trying and financially devastating that I still don’t like to talk about it. We were not out of the woods quite yet—the new second floor had been framed, roofed, and clad in plywood, but the window in question was still nothing more than a rough opening to the air outlined in two-by-six studs.
    On good days that year, Judith and I regarded Charlie with gratitude and even a measure of awe: it was already evident he had succeeded in transforming our humdrum little bungalow into a house of real character and, for us then, what seemed a perfect fit. On certain other days, however, when the complexity of Charlie’s design had brought our contractor to the cliff of despair and move-in day had retreated yet another month, I eyed Charlie with suspicion, if