Maybe the problem is pictures, that we think in pictures, and we want to: the point of a wedding may be to reduce the weather-like volatility of a relationship into an authoritative picture of cake, happiness, lace, and rented tuxedo. Homes too are imagined as they should be – the Platonic version – before the mail begins to pile up on the table, before the collapsible pool dominating the yard leaves a round ring of brown on the grass, before our bodies leave their imprints in the furniture and their smudges on the walls, before the apple tree took on that strange lopsided shape, before the floor lost its sheen, before the last 117 purchases buried the architecture altogether. Dream homes are dreamt in pictures, and again and again, well-off people move to the country because the picture is so great: there are the mountains, here are the ten acres with wall or split-rail girdled round, in the middle is the rustic cabin or the rugged adobe or the ranch house with the stone fireplace. And like children in fantasy books, the buyers step into the picture only to find out that there is still the problem of time: the mountains are uplifting, but they want to do things, they want to talk to people, they want access to the comforts of civilization, and these may not be included with the elk or the woodpeckers or the aspen grove, let alone the blizzard, the snowed-out roads, the broken well pump; and so they move, and someone else comes along and tries out living in pictures. Or maybe we want to be still as pictures, keep inserting ourselves into them, but find we are too restless and active to stay in them. As thought we wanted to be pressed flowers, but went on blooming and going to seed, decaying and regenerating.
stem: rebecca solnit
perspectief: or maybe we want to be still as pictures […] but find we are too restless and active to stay in them.
title: deep freeze
bron: the encyclopedia of trouble and spaciousness (2014)
mopw: meerstemmige encyclopedie / appel