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| From "The Victory Garden" |
The house volunteer was watching me closely as I stood in Edith Wharton’s library in Lenox, MA and smelled it. I was trying to getting a big enough whiff of Wharton’s ‘old books’ that the odor would lodge in my brain for a while. The old book smell didn’t seep across the threshold but as soon as I stepped into the lovely oak paneled room the volumes of leather bound books greeted me with the soothing aroma.
Rationally, I know it is probably the smell of mold, dust and leather but that didn’t stop me from standing at the railing, as close to the books as possible, and trying to breath in a little of Edith Wharton’s soul.
When I opened my eyes and looked around the perfectly appointed room (Wharton designed and decorated it herself) I realized that the books represented all the ideas, feelings, dreams and beauty that Wharton would have learned during her lifetime. Reading, along with actually experience, were the only way to experience ideas at the turn of the century. Wharton didn’t have movies, television, radio or TED talks to open her eyes to new ways of thinking. She had two choices: she could do it or read about it. Ostensibly, a persons library represented all they had learned, valued and been inspired by during their lifetime.
So I stood in Wharton’s library (which was only a fraction of the size when she actually lived here in the early 1900s) and imagined her, at the different ages of her life and development, holding the books, lost in thought, turning the pages and marking passages to discuss with friends (or maybe with her friend, Henry James on his next visit).
Wharton’s tales did not come from the lovely desk in her library but from her bedroom. Apparently she posed for photographs in the library but didn’t actually write there. She wrote in her BED! I climbed the stairs to see the room, which was empty with the exception of a poster with this wonderful insight... Gaillard Lapsley recalled a typical morning at The Mount; Edith would be propped up in bed, “she would have her writing board perilously furnished with an ink pot on her knee, the dog of the moment under her left elbow and the bed strewn with correspondence, newspapers and books.” Replace the ink pot with a laptop and the dog with a cat and it would be a familiar site in my own house.
I stood on the terrace looking out at the gardens and fountain and though about Edith Wharton and the ups an downs of her adventurous life, about the hopes and dreams she had when she built The Mount and what it must have felt like a decade later when she packed everything up and left for Paris; her marriage destroyed and her future uncertain. I know she had fond memories of The Mount throughout her life as her “first real home” so I tried to think of the happy times as well.
When I zipped up the driveway and parked by the stables an hour earlier I was thinking about how different my life was from the Gilded Age existence that Wharton lived 100 years ago. But after smelling her books, standing in her bedroom and gazing at the gardens I realized that, even though the way we live had changed so much, we had the simple joy of making a home, planting a garden, reading and writing (in bed and out) in common.
When I opened my eyes and looked around the perfectly appointed room (Wharton designed and decorated it herself) I realized that the books represented all the ideas, feelings, dreams and beauty that Wharton would have learned during her lifetime. Reading, along with actually experience, were the only way to experience ideas at the turn of the century. Wharton didn’t have movies, television, radio or TED talks to open her eyes to new ways of thinking. She had two choices: she could do it or read about it. Ostensibly, a persons library represented all they had learned, valued and been inspired by during their lifetime.
So I stood in Wharton’s library (which was only a fraction of the size when she actually lived here in the early 1900s) and imagined her, at the different ages of her life and development, holding the books, lost in thought, turning the pages and marking passages to discuss with friends (or maybe with her friend, Henry James on his next visit).
Wharton’s tales did not come from the lovely desk in her library but from her bedroom. Apparently she posed for photographs in the library but didn’t actually write there. She wrote in her BED! I climbed the stairs to see the room, which was empty with the exception of a poster with this wonderful insight... Gaillard Lapsley recalled a typical morning at The Mount; Edith would be propped up in bed, “she would have her writing board perilously furnished with an ink pot on her knee, the dog of the moment under her left elbow and the bed strewn with correspondence, newspapers and books.” Replace the ink pot with a laptop and the dog with a cat and it would be a familiar site in my own house.
I stood on the terrace looking out at the gardens and fountain and though about Edith Wharton and the ups an downs of her adventurous life, about the hopes and dreams she had when she built The Mount and what it must have felt like a decade later when she packed everything up and left for Paris; her marriage destroyed and her future uncertain. I know she had fond memories of The Mount throughout her life as her “first real home” so I tried to think of the happy times as well.
When I zipped up the driveway and parked by the stables an hour earlier I was thinking about how different my life was from the Gilded Age existence that Wharton lived 100 years ago. But after smelling her books, standing in her bedroom and gazing at the gardens I realized that, even though the way we live had changed so much, we had the simple joy of making a home, planting a garden, reading and writing (in bed and out) in common.
When I popped the ‘The Age of Innocence’ CD in my car stereo and joined the traffic on the Mass Pike I felt like l was listening to the story of an old friend.
