The Borrower's Exile
Nov. 23rd, 2007 03:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmIt is a habit of New Yorkers to look in every window they can. This has little to do with invading the private lives of people -- but with invading the private lives of buildings. From the tenements our grandparents and great-grandparents lived in to the few great private mansions that have not been turned into museums, we want to know how the other half lives, and, we want to know how much it costs them.
More than a lot of people, probably most, I really have seen the gamut of New York apartments from the inside. After all, one of my classmates growing up lived in The Dakota, another had the penthouse at The Beekman, many lived in single-family townhouses, which we must remember were mere middle-class residences at the time they were built, the grand mansions being another thing. Walk up and down the streets between Fifth and Madison and Park in the 60s and 70s and 80s, and you'll learn to tell the diference, fast. It is as if the body knows oppulence, even when the life does not.
It is hard to describe how I feel about these grand houses, that I will probably never reside in, simply because most people will probably never reside in them, and I understand statistics. It does sound so understated when I put it that way, though, doesn't it? I know that I feel comfortable in these places, though they are often off-putting or unimaginable to others. I know that I show people the correct manner in which to descend such a staircase in such a house whenever I take them to look at the Cooper Hewitt, not for its displays which are quite nice, but for the interior of the its lost world.
I am not jealous, but it would be a lie to say that I do not long for these palaces of the end of aristocracy like some lost home. I have always been an exile from all things. It is hard to explain the degree to which my love of the Regency is actually about the love of my lost and borrowed childhood.
I am a Borrower, which is like some species of not quite carion bird. But this is what it means for me to be a writer and an actor -- a storyteller -- I borrow. I live in flesh that is not my own and has never existed, shop with the tastes of fantastical strangers, and know the feeling of arms that are less solid than anything anyone should be able to feel at all. As a child, I learnt that if I matched my posture and gait to the person walking in front of me, just so, I couldn't help but discover how they felt; it was one of my most terrible secrets, hidden, lest my mother laught and tell me Girls can't do that as if boys could. And so too I borrow houses, for stories and hopes, for the women I will never be and the men I have never been.
One of those houses is located near Miss Hewitt's, but I can't ever recall it having caught my eye as a child, I suppose because I looked up less then, I suppose because those houses were less foreign then -- oh lord, I learnt so fast to never look startled at wealth! It is a thing I am out of practice with now, although you'd have to look close to catch it.
One night walking about taking photos for our fanfiction, Kali and I declared that this particular building was a highly suitable model for Lucius's Paletine Crescent townhouse in Descensus. I was amused in that tight, gentle, sorrowful way I must be at these things. And I was delighted, for it is my task in this world to make things solid that should not quite be. And we lamented, that we should never see its insides, except faintly, through a high window we could just glimpse into a corner of from the street.
Thanks to an advertisement in the New York Times, I know that, that townhouse is currently for sale, and it is a required discipline of a Borrower like myself never to wish of winning the lottery. It creates an ungracious anxiousness and harms, somehow, the narrative of that which is coveted. But I do wish this, that I still had friends with the sort of names that could ensure a showing of such a thing. Not to take pictures -- that would be gauche and not possible -- but so I could stand at the window and glance out at the street and for a moment be a man who has never existed, surveying a domain that I will never see, even if through something dark and not right and broken I breathe faintly when I tell you this and somehow know in flickering seconds that feel of damask, golden and with that faint wear of twenty years, under my palms.
More than a lot of people, probably most, I really have seen the gamut of New York apartments from the inside. After all, one of my classmates growing up lived in The Dakota, another had the penthouse at The Beekman, many lived in single-family townhouses, which we must remember were mere middle-class residences at the time they were built, the grand mansions being another thing. Walk up and down the streets between Fifth and Madison and Park in the 60s and 70s and 80s, and you'll learn to tell the diference, fast. It is as if the body knows oppulence, even when the life does not.
It is hard to describe how I feel about these grand houses, that I will probably never reside in, simply because most people will probably never reside in them, and I understand statistics. It does sound so understated when I put it that way, though, doesn't it? I know that I feel comfortable in these places, though they are often off-putting or unimaginable to others. I know that I show people the correct manner in which to descend such a staircase in such a house whenever I take them to look at the Cooper Hewitt, not for its displays which are quite nice, but for the interior of the its lost world.
I am not jealous, but it would be a lie to say that I do not long for these palaces of the end of aristocracy like some lost home. I have always been an exile from all things. It is hard to explain the degree to which my love of the Regency is actually about the love of my lost and borrowed childhood.
I am a Borrower, which is like some species of not quite carion bird. But this is what it means for me to be a writer and an actor -- a storyteller -- I borrow. I live in flesh that is not my own and has never existed, shop with the tastes of fantastical strangers, and know the feeling of arms that are less solid than anything anyone should be able to feel at all. As a child, I learnt that if I matched my posture and gait to the person walking in front of me, just so, I couldn't help but discover how they felt; it was one of my most terrible secrets, hidden, lest my mother laught and tell me Girls can't do that as if boys could. And so too I borrow houses, for stories and hopes, for the women I will never be and the men I have never been.
One of those houses is located near Miss Hewitt's, but I can't ever recall it having caught my eye as a child, I suppose because I looked up less then, I suppose because those houses were less foreign then -- oh lord, I learnt so fast to never look startled at wealth! It is a thing I am out of practice with now, although you'd have to look close to catch it.
One night walking about taking photos for our fanfiction, Kali and I declared that this particular building was a highly suitable model for Lucius's Paletine Crescent townhouse in Descensus. I was amused in that tight, gentle, sorrowful way I must be at these things. And I was delighted, for it is my task in this world to make things solid that should not quite be. And we lamented, that we should never see its insides, except faintly, through a high window we could just glimpse into a corner of from the street.
Thanks to an advertisement in the New York Times, I know that, that townhouse is currently for sale, and it is a required discipline of a Borrower like myself never to wish of winning the lottery. It creates an ungracious anxiousness and harms, somehow, the narrative of that which is coveted. But I do wish this, that I still had friends with the sort of names that could ensure a showing of such a thing. Not to take pictures -- that would be gauche and not possible -- but so I could stand at the window and glance out at the street and for a moment be a man who has never existed, surveying a domain that I will never see, even if through something dark and not right and broken I breathe faintly when I tell you this and somehow know in flickering seconds that feel of damask, golden and with that faint wear of twenty years, under my palms.
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no subject
Date: 2007-11-23 08:44 pm (UTC)It's funny how much we enjoy being part of the dying breed of people who know how to walk down staircases and about proper wineglasses and etiquette, and all the trappings of an extinct society.
Not carrion birds, but those bower birds which find the loveliest bluest little things they can find, and arrange them in a secluded spot so that some small audience will pass and maybe also see their beauty. It's our gift to pick the little blue pebble out of the rubble and spot its potential, and to know that if we arrange it in a bower with blue petals and feathers and blossoms, we'll have beauty you won't need the borrower's eyes to see.