The First Cloud

While reading Richard Sennett’s The Conscience of the Eye I came across a reference to William Orchardson’s painting The First Cloud. It comments on the nature of home and civil strife, the beginnings of trouble however unavoidable in human hands. A passage follows from the same Victorian era penned by John Ruskin, from 1865, regarding the idyll of home:

“This is the true nature of home – it is the place of peace: the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold it ceases to be a home; it is then only a part of the outer world which you have roofed over and lighted fire in. But so far as it is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth…it is a home.”

Well, that does draw to mind the rumbles on Winfield Street. It at once feels correct to be living here in relation to The City, high on a hill to the southeast of center, and that I have met so many lately who live here or very near. Yet what’s missing is the embrace of each space in the home, not only my bedroom. The entirety of the common spaces are the realm of one person, not all of us. I carve out time whenever I can to be here during the workweek and move from room to room, drinking tea by the Christmas tree, pausing in the garden, washing a dish in the kitchen, reclining on a divan in my room with one of the dogs curled up beside me. Then it is Ruskin's Vestal Temple, a Temple of the Hearth.
Is home meant to last or is that an impossible desire in every case? When a thing I have done in the house is moved, put away, changed, erased, I want to move on to a more private idyll, since where I sleep is but a “part of the outer world which I have roofed over and lighted a fire in.”