Gotham Diary:
Gracious Living
10 January 2014
There came my way, last night, a link to a site called Raw Story, where someone had gathered up some humorous tweets that were posted during the prolonged press conference that took place in Trenton, New Jersey, yesterday. Surely the best of these was the one posted by Michael E Cohen. “What do you call someone who dies because of a politically-inspired traffic jam? A ‘corpus Christie’!”
My favorite line in today’s Times coverage of the event appeared in Michael Barbaro’s commentary on the political performance.
But this version of Chris Christie — the chastened, penitent public official — was hard to keep up, and he occasionally lapsed into a familiar pique.
This reminded me of Alan Bennett’s judgment of Margaret Thatcher. Chris Christie, too, seems to be a “mirthless bully.”
***
I finished Lucy Lethbridge’s Servants the other day, but I have yet to type up all the flagged passages and (thereby) to compose my thoughts. What lingers is the phrase “gracious living,” a term that comes up several times in the book but that is never really defined. Its advocates, one of them a certain Angus Maude, assume that gracious living is a good thing. They also assume that it requires domestic service — servants. They regret that people who might sacrifice themselves to the greater good by becoming servants prefer to do other things with their lives. This regret is odious, and I’m not terribly interested in hearing a defense of a way of life that rests upon the belittlement of anybody. But the term, gracious living, remains. What might it mean now? Seriously.
I’m not interested in the shelter magazine interpretation of “gracious living,” in which an attractive exterior is actuated by disingenuous pretension, usually for purposes of display. I’m interested in the kind of gracious living that might be enjoyed by people living together in a household, welcoming guests from time to time but making no extraordinary efforts when they do. It is a way of life that is clean, orderly, and comfortable — three virtues in balance. The pursuit of each of them, singly, can be carried to obsessive extremes; pursued together, they check excesses.
What does gracious living look like? This is a matter of taste. Gracious living looks good to the people in the household. You may not care much for someone else’s gracious home, but your own ought to please you. This is not quite the same thing as comfort. Our homes embody our identities, and if you don’t think that your home embodies your identity, you’re simply mistaken, because you’re an inattentive person and that’s what your home says about you.
The default pattern in domestic style is the preservation of the familiar: you make your home look like the one you grew up in. Except for those who suffered miserable childhoods, familiarity is probably the healthiest root of comfort, as well as the reference point for ideas about cleanliness and order. Begin with the familiar, but pay attention to it and improve upon it. There is always more to learn.
Some stylish and affluent people like to treat their homes as if they were wardrobes, in need of regular updating, but this is hardly a characteristic of gracious living generally and can easily interfere with it. The same is true of luxuries. There is nothing wrong with opulence that is sincere and manageable, but it must be affordable in both senses: you must be able to pay for it without sacrificing necessities, and you must have the time and space in which to maintain it. Silver tureens and marble bathrooms don’t take care of themselves. Nor, in the current dispensation, do servants take care of them. You take care of them. That understood, knock yourself out.
It is, unfortunately, common to talk about the look of a home as if it had nothing to do with the daily routines of the people who live in it. This is totally wrong. The interplay between function and decor is constant and complex — or, at least, it ought to be. The handsome dining room that nobody uses is mere meaningless ostentation, but it might become something else the moment one of the members of the household claims it as a writing room. (I have always believed that dining rooms ought to do double duty as libraries.)
How does the notion of gracious living accommodate a big-screen television? Ideally, it places it in a home theatre, where all seats face it and the lights can be uniformly dimmed. An unfinished basement might have to serve. The one place where it doesn’t belong is in a room where people gather to talk or even to read.
How is gracious living managed? I shall take this up in a later post. For now, two words will do, regularity and anticipation. Gracious living is the easygoing anticipation of irregularity.