Living in our houses

Last weekend I visited a friend who owns a Steinway baby grand. He told me about the history of the Steinway brand, the unlikely success of its orphaned and impoverished founder, and how the Steinway is manufactured--literally, made by hand--today, but I could hardly pay attention. Slowly moved my fingers over the keys, and aching in my arms and back stirred old, old muscle memories: how I would lean into the instrument and in it sing, my voices weaving in and out of each other, finding in an old familiar rag the intensity. Some said I had a gift for it.

Then we moved away to graduate school and there was no piano around, and everyone studied late and woke early, and years went by and I did not play and did not play. I remember when I came home for vacation, sat at my parents' upright piano to play the old favorites, and discovered that they were gone. The muscles tensed but nothing moved, like the stump where arm used to be. The piano was for me a limb lost.

As my friend finished his story about Steinway, my ears perked up at his closing remark: "It's quite an amazing machine." A Steinway baby grand piano, a machine?

Leaving aside necessary distinctions between tool and machine, I was arrested at the thought that I had brought a mechanism into myself and made it of my own body an extension; I did not manipulate the keys so that the piano sang, but I sang in the piano. How queer that I could live, so to speak, in an assembly of wood and metal.

All the way home from that visit, I was keenly aware of how I drive my car. As I guided it in between the proper lines and around cars and corners, I realized that the car becomes an extension of my personal space. When someone crowds too close to the car, I feel it as crowding too close to me; similarly, I feel how close I am to the center line much as I would feel how close I am to the wall as I walk in a hallway. I not only control the car as it moves, but in the car I move.

Then I became aware that, as I drive, I look several hundred feet ahead and project myself, so to speak, into that space, imagining what I will do there, driving each segment in my imagination before I drive it on the road. I looked around at the fields on either side of the highway, at the road ahead and behind, and thought to myself:

I live in the space around me.

Let me try to say that more clearly. When I see the road ahead, I do not change or touch the road; the road has nothing real in it by which it is related to me. But because I see the road, I am changed and touched by the road; there is something real in me by which I am related to the road, and by knowledge I am present to the road. This happens because I sense and know the road. A rock does not dwell in the space around it as I do: if I were a machine, and if my eyes were video cameras, then I would be no different from the rock; but because I am an animal, and my eyes organs of sensation, I am a true inhabitant of all the area around me. As Saint Augustine says, Anima ubi videt, ibi sentit; et ubi sentit, ibi vivit; et ubi vivit, ibi est: "Where the soul sees, there it senses; where it senses, there it lives; and where it lives, there it is."

The Vitruvian Duck recently commented, in typically penetrating fashion, that a house relates to its owners as the body relates to the soul. On that drive home from my friend's house, it finally came home to me what that means: we really do live in our houses, and not just within the volume of our bodies. St. Thomas Aquinas points out that "Something is said to be by 'presence' in all the things that fall under its gaze, as all the things in a house are said to be 'present' to someone, who nonetheless does not exist by his substance in every part of the house" (ST 1.8.3 corp).

The vast size of the cosmos is often trotted out as evidence that man is insignificant. "See how small a territory is ours, one of the smaller planets circling one of the smaller stars in one of the smaller galaxies! So much for man as the center of the universe."

But this misses the point exactly: Because we are men and not machines, animals and not rocks, we truly live in the cosmos. St. Thomas Aquinas goes so far as to say that, in a manner of speaking, when the soul sees the heavens, it lives and exists in the heavens (ST 1.8.4, ad 6). Man is the dweller universal.