Of all the side-effects of discovering my vocation at the age of sixtyish, the urge to have a distinct workplace is the most unexpected. For all of my life, I have been a dedicated home-worker. So far as I have worked at all, that is — and it didn’t amount to much until a few years (or a few months!) ago. I’m talking about work here, not “productivity.” I’m talking about meeting defined goals whether I’m in the mood to do so or not.

Although I still believe in the ideal of a harmonious (if hardly seamless) overlay of domestic life and personal industry — living above the shop, as it were — I recognize the impediments more honestly than I used to do. If I were a Victorian master of the house, I could close my study door and expect not to be disturbed; but in fact my position is much closer to that of the Victorian mistress of the house: I’m the one who has to see that the household hums. Don’t we all? Only the richest of the rich can afford to employ the kind of servant who is truly capable of housekeeping, and in fact such employees are not called servants anymore.

So: wouldn’t it be nice to “go to the office” for at least part of every day? Wouldn’t it be loverly to have a room, somewhere in the neighborhood — a studio apartment, say — to which I could move the contents of the blue room (books, mostly). I wouldn’t have a landline, and hardly anyone has my cellphone number. For a few hours every day, I wouldn’t see anything that didn’t pertain to site-related projects.

That’s the problem right there: I wouldn’t have a moment’s peace. I happen to be one of those creatures who is more disturbed by what he can’t see than by what’s in plain sight. I’d worry about a break-in at home. I’d remember that I’d forgotten to water the pots on the balcony. I’d obsess about dinner (what to make, which store to shop at, the possibilities of ordering in). I think far too much about dinner as it is, but I don’t obsess, because the kitchen is right here, and I can have a look in the freezer at any time. (Later, thanks!)

So I pigeonhole the dream of a separate workplace among my other fantasies — arrangements that cannot obtain in the universe as it is currently constituted. Then I get out the vacuum cleaner.  

This entry was posted on Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Weekend Update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.