Philosophy of the Home: Domestic Space and HappinessMindprints: Thoreau's Material Worlds

These two studies of the phenomenology of place differ sharply in style, method, and focus. Material culture historian-critic Ivan Gaskell's scholarly reconstruction of “the worlds” inhabited by the American writer-craftsman-scientist-philosopher-activist Henry Thoreau delivers a reading experience quite unlike social theorist Emanuele Coccia's sweeping generalizations about how he and others do and should live now. Yet these books converge as complementary meditations on the relation between socioenvironmental contexts and personal worlds, especially as regards the arts of building and dwelling.Philosophy of the Home is a confessed peregrine's brief for the virtue not so much of home as of homemaking. Every relocation requires an act of homemaking that testifies to the values of home as an intimate counterspace against an impersonal metropolis and to the necessity of fashioning a livable microworld as a prerequisite to being an I. From the baseline paradox of moving = homemaking, Coccia moves through a selective inventory of elements, material and affective, that constitute the experience of home. On each he reflects expansively, wryly, at times pretentiously, in consistently inventive and often arrestingly confessional ways. Bathrooms, Household Articles, Love, Wardrobes, Social Media, Bedrooms, Corridors, Pets, Kitchens, Gardens—these are some of Coccia's categories. The vein of rumination is somewhere between a treatise and an assemblage of short essays, but with pretty sustained freshness of insight throughout, even in his more vatic pronouncements. Not every reader will care to think of home as “a space of involuntary animism” where “things stop being things” and instead become “a panpsychic machine of universal animation,” but those alive to the comfort and charisma of totem objects will relish—and also chuckle at—the hyperbole, as the author no doubt intends. In this way, Philosophy of the Home can reward either casual surfing through its cascade of obiter dicta or deeper pondering of its exegesis of the unanticipated significances of the familiar.Gaskell's Mindprints is a much more grounded and granular work, more concentrated on a specific time and locale: the social and natural landscape of Thoreau's nineteenth-century Concord as its Yankee population diversified, urbanism took hold, and the Native American dispensation dwindled into memory. But the acuity and expansiveness with which Gaskell builds on Thoreau's luminous metaphor—of Native American artifacts as “mindprints” of the culture that created them—entitle his book to a broader readership than the tribe of Thoreau specialists, although they are certain to be its chief readers. Mindprints offers a constellation of studies that like Coccia's sorties achieve more cumulative and interlocking force than the somewhat wayward look of the table of contents. Gaskell explores, in turn and overlappingly, Thoreau's attentiveness to demographic alteration and technosocial change within his region, past and present; his practice and theory of shelter-building; his conception of artistic practice more generally; his various collections; and his sensitivity to soundscapes. These Gaskell holds up as telltale instances of how Thoreau perceived and sought to turn to creative account the interdependence of human and natural worlds, the possibilities of life in place, and the shifting practices, over time, of human inhabitance.As such, Mindprints delivers not a personalized metaphysics of homemaking as world-building but a reconnaissance of a unique historical actor's homespun world-making projects, whether vast (Thoreau's conception and portrayal of the fast-changing socioenvironmental landscape of his day) or microscale (his collections of material objects: minerals, plants, and artifacts). One of the book's strongest sections, for instance, reappraises the physical act of shelter-building for which Thoreau is most famous—his house at Walden—against the background of the millennia-long transit of humanity from nomadism to sedentism to modern urbanism, questioning in the process modern Western culture's assumption that sedentism is the inevitable, or intrinsically better, or even the most prevalent, mode of living in the twenty-first century. Here and elsewhere, Gaskell shrewdly portrays Thoreau as both prescient and provincial, bound to think with, but also ready to think against, the grain. In this way, Gaskell's Thoreau and Coccia's persona seem quasi counterparts as embedded actors seeking to think beyond the limits of the habitus one so easily takes for granted.The point where the convergence—but also the disparity—of the underlying premises of Mindprints and Philosophy of Home is most clear-cut is in their presentations of pre-Romantic ideas of the “primitive hut.” In Philosophy of the Home this occurs during a charming riff on modern urbanites’ urge to return to nature via fantasies of cityscapes as reminiscent of prehistoric forests where humans once dwelled. Thoreau's house at Walden exemplifies, for Coccia, “the most elementary model of the artifact” that “hides the fact that it has been built.” For Gaskell, Thoreau's housebuilding in Walden woods was a practical as well as aesthetic mediation between the human and the natural that stands “in contrast to the dominant European conception of architecture as the pursuit of ideal forms.” In effect, Coccia cannot imagine a “primitive hut” that is other than a symbolic fantasy. For him, metropolitan inhabitance is humankind's inevitable and rightful destiny, whereas for Gaskell it is by no means inevitable or even desirable. Vernacular architecture, especially of the portable or disposable kind, is inherently as good as or better than skyscraper densification; and if, as with Thoreau's house, the ingredients of a shelter can be recycled for other uses, so much the better. Still, both of these books, in their different ways, value temporary shelter as an opportune vantage point for bracing original assessments of the phenomenology of place that go far beyond the sentimental pieties of rootedness.