Section V. The House

In discussing what makes a building a dwelling, Heidegger emphasizes the “fourfold,” that is, “earth and sky, divinities and mortals” (149). Each element of the fourfold implicitly calls to mind the other three, yet, as mortals, “we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four” (150). To truly dwell in the fourfold, Heidegger argues, we must preserve and allow each aspect to be itself, to “receive the sky as sky” and “await the divinities as divinities.” Thus, for a building to be a dwelling, it must allow for this fourfold, for to block the fourfold, to interfere with the oneness of the four and also with the nature of each aspect, is to prevent dwelling. Miss Susan’s house is a true dwelling place.
The house is low, one story. The central room is the kitchen. It runs the length of the house, and holds the stovetop, the oven, the magnet-covered refrigerator, a laundry closet, a counter, and the old wood table at which I sat to write, at which I have sat so many times to eat, to talk, to write, to rest my feet after hours of tireless labor. Windows bookend the kitchen (during the day, no lights are necessary in the house; it is as sunny inside as out), and cats are often seen on one side of the window or the other, always wanting to exit or enter the house. Plants decorate every corner; a potted tree near the entrance, a Christmas cactus hanging to the floor by the microwave. When Miss Susan was redoing the kitchen tiles seven years ago, she said she wanted to bring in the sky. The soft gray stone tiles are tinged with and textured with every color—green, blue, pink—all very pale and mellowed into the swirling pattern of the stone. The color differences only appear upon study; at a glance, it is the sky we saw just before sunset, but softer, as if it lost its brilliance when it was brought all the way down to the ground.
To argue that this central room and the rooms surrounding it constitute a dwelling, I must not only defend their sense of the fourfold but what it means to dwell in this context. Heidegger examines the linguistic origins of the word “dwell.” He traces the word through peace, freedom, sparing as returning something to where it ought to be (freeing it), and preserving these senses. Thus, to dwell means “to be at peace, to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature” (149). This does not mean one leads a necessarily easy life, for any life involving the land will encounter some degree of turmoil. It does mean that one must be at peace with dwelling, with being a mortal alive on the earth, as a part of the earth and its creatures, and that a dwelling must provide for this peace, and this sense of connection, and also provide this safety, this preservation that is also freedom.
With the windows, the soft floor, the ever-present green of the plants, and the constant movement in and out of cats and dogs, the kitchen seems to flow outside, yet at once it is a shelter; warm in the winter, cool in the summer as it receives cross-breezes from the open doors and windows, always a place to gather one’s thoughts when the rest of the barn is too much. The lowness of the house prevents it from being an intrusion on the landscape, and the shelter it provides to all beings—human, cat, dog, at times bird, butterfly, even horse—provides it with a deep quality of preservation, of protection. The kitchen alone, as the center of the house and in many ways the nerve-center of the entire barn, allows the house to serve as a dwelling, not only for its permanent residents (human and other) but all who pass through.
The house is close to the shape of a square, with two rooms bridging off on either side of the kitchen. On the one side of the house, the side closer to the barn, is an entry-room/mudroom with another small room branching off it, once an office, now a storage room belonging primarily to the house-cats. This small room at one time served as a stall, when an underweight baby Thoroughbred who would have not survived the winter was sheltered there. The room was bedded with hay and barricaded from the rest of the house by stacks of trunks, but the filly was soon strong enough to jump over the barricade and was often found in the bedroom, gleefully throwing clothes and books and terrifying the dogs. Also on the side is the current office, formerly a sort of den. The back wall of the office is a glass sliding door, always left open as long as the weather allows.
The other side of the house contains the bedrooms—across from the mudroom, Miss Susan’s bedroom, and in front, the guest bedroom. Both rooms are lined with books: books on horses—fact and fiction, volumes of poetry, old National Geographics, history books about World War II, a good slice of the literary canon, a very yellow copy of “The Golden Bough. I have spent many nights on the sunken, flowered couch in the guest bedroom, under a solitary blanket in the summer nights not spent outside, and wrapped in half the quilts in the house in winter. On those cold nights, I am always accompanied by at least one dog, usually Bookie, whose impression of warmth leaves my feet in the morning, dragging me out of bed along with it.
I have never slept better anywhere than I do when visiting the barn. Because natural light and fresh air are so prevalent in every room of the house, I always wake up feeling healthy and deeply rested, even if I have only lain down for a few hours between finishing the evening chores and an extremely late dinner and getting up with the sun to begin work again. On those mornings, the kitchen is always light and smells of coffee, and I drift between breakfast in the kitchen and morning chores outside. As hard as the work can be, nothing is as refreshing as stepping into a large green field first thing in the morning and letting a herd of grateful ponies in to be fed, then returning to the house to put my feet up and drown a mug of coffee. While the house provides shelter and a sense of calm apart from the world around, it cannot be separated from the rest of the barn, so integrated are the experiences of outdoors and indoors, work and rest.
Again, the house at once flows continuously with the outside and provides shelter to all who need it. It is unobtrusive and practical, it is lovely and simple, it is dry and safe, it is full of light and air, and, by virtue of its proximity to the barn and way in which it is absolutely a part of the barn and the barn a part of it, it carries the flavor of the divine that horses bear. It embraces earth and sky, it allows mortals to dwell, and carries a sense of divinity with no pretensions, thus embracing Heidegger’s fourfold. At the same time, it holds many of the place-memories centered around the barn, and is inseparable from both the meanings and the actions of the place.