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Much has been written about the writer’s cabin. Among the most notable recent books on the topic are “Heidegger’s Hut” by Adam Sharr and “A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams,” Michael Pollan’s account of imagining and then actually constructing his own writing space. A standard Internet search can quickly yield images of the writing rooms (cabins, huts, sheds) of legendary scriveners: Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roald Dahl, Carl Jung, Henry Thoreau and — a writer of a markedly different sort —Ted Kaczynski, to name a few. And Jill Krementz’s 1999 collection of photographs “The Writer’s Desk” gives us tantalizing glimpses of writers sitting at their desks. But why the interest? Have these places somehow become secular sites of the sacred?

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Who has not fantasized about the books they would write if only the right conditions could be found! I have carried around just such a dream, sparked by a weekend alone in an austere mountain cabin in the Austrian Alps when I was a boy. Rumination was unstoppable, and poetry just poured out.

For the most part, these buildings are small, plain, unprepossessing and sparsely furnished. This poses a problem for my first hypothesis — that the fascination of these dwellings rests on the hope that we may glean something of the secret of the writer’s genius from the creative space to which they habitually retreated. For we might well conclude from Wittgenstein’s famously almost empty college room in Cambridge (in which he had a deck chair), and indeed from the plainness of so many of these huts, that far from giving expression to, or feeding in some revealing way, the otherwise inaccessible inner workings of the brilliant mind, they reflect a disdainful resistance to the importance of surroundings, an asceticism, an architectural tabula rasa. This would explain why some people work well on planes, in hotel rooms, library carrels, even monastic and indeed prison cells. (Boethius, Bunyan, Gramsci and Negri all wrote significant works while imprisoned.) They are relieved of distraction. Sartre was famous for writing in the corner of Les Deux Magots – cafe privacy, where the white noise of conversation and cutlery damps down distracting input, fashioning a creative cocoon in the midst of the world.



It is not clear, when we look at Heidegger’s writing scene — the wooden desk, with the ink blotter, the old chair — whether these items have some deep meaning, or whether they are the recessive background that makes possible a certain concentration. Most of the items visible in the images available to us are generic and without distinction. Perhaps that is important. The sad truth may be that while we (especially we writers) hope to learn something of the secret of the author from his or her workspace we are often disappointed, just as meeting a famous person can be a letdown.

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Photographs of writer’s retreats fall into three broad categories: exteriors, interiors and prospects (views from within), and each has a distinct significance. Exteriors give focus to the imaginative challenge: what was going on that room? It seems a touch more decipherable than what was going on in her head? Interiors, especially those furnished as our own spaces might be, with a desk and a chair, allow us to make comparisons imaginatively to transpose ourselves into that space, even as we mark the distance. But there are distinct details of the writer’s room, too, ones we can never assign to ourselves: the fat fountain pen on Freud’s desk — now an anachronism, as well as a cliché. Or his row of Egyptian figurines? Were they vital parts of his creative process? But ultimately, it is the typical ordinariness of these interiors that is of real interest.

The third category of perspective — prospects, the view outside from within — offers a different sort of insight.. Bertrand Russell’s house, at Plas Penrhyn, near Portmeirion, in Wales, is somewhat plain, but its distant view up the Glaslyn estuary to the slopes of Snowdon is spectacular. As it happens, we do not have many photos of the views from writers’ cabins, and of them, Heidegger’s is the prettiest, if not exactly sublime. From the dozens of such cabins that I have inspected — some personally, others in books or through Google — it is clear that most of these spaces look inward rather than outward. Desks are often in the center of the room, rather than at a window, as if the view of the outdoors was not at a premium. To the extent that some satisfaction is taken in being in nature, it is not so much having a view of nature as being part of it.

Perhaps the humble shack is precisely designed not to stand out more than necessary. Tree, rock, path, shack. And when perusing the image of the shack, we are offered a view of what can be seen from inside or from its immediate vicinity, there is no doubting the interpretive complexity that awaits us. We look to these images as satisfying a certain desire on the part of the writer — “a room of one’s own” — a desire with which we can identify. It is tempting to suppose that the significance we give to the view is shared by the writer. This is behind the disappointment we may well feel at the visual modesty of so many of these sites. Russell’s Sierra Club vista — with its views of Snowdon and the estuary — is truly an exception. More important, the aesthetic distance sustained by a beautiful view may actually be problematic. Heidegger said as much in his ruminations in “Why I Stay in the Provinces,” in which he distanced himself from an aesthetic appreciation of the working landscapes of his South German peasants.

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The possibility of exploring all three categories obviously gives an actual visit to the site a special appeal. The sign near Heidegger’s hut that marks it as Heidegger family property, and that indicates that the family does not welcome tourists, must be dispiriting for those who trekked in expecting some sort of dwelling communion with the genius loci, if not the spirit of the master. And yet unless the original has been preserved and made publicly available, photographs may be far the best access to a past that is no more.

Photographs that include the author can then be particularly valuable; Krementz’s images give us tantalizing glimpses of writers sitting at their desks. But might they not also strain the imagination? A contemporary viewer inclined to imagining himself working in the same space might find the image of the writer doing so an obstacle. This is analogous to the privilege of radio over TV; TV kills the imagination that radio requires. Again, it is hard to know what to make of the onsite reconstruction of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, or of the Newseum’s exhibition of Ted Kaczynski’s 10-by-12 Montana shack, each of which effects a serious displacement of the reality effect, the magic of touching the original. If I pick up Freud’s pen, the very pen he held in his hand, does something flow from him to me? Am I not at least licensed to imagine a common ground between us, however structurally, culturally, historically mediated? Is not the same true of opening the very door that Nietzsche or Kaczynski, or Dahl opened, turning the same handle? Who could not be moved by the thought of touching even a fragment of the linen shroud that held the body of Christ, and still preserves his crucified image? Why reach out to touch the hem of a rock star? Is the famous writer’s cabin a modern fetish?

It is not uncommon to mark one’s reservation at the Arcadian settings so favored by these huts, as if marking the shape of distance that serious writing must take – distance from technology, from the modern, from the city. Is there not something politically anachronistic about the image of the water trough outside Heidegger’s hut, where a spring unfailingly flows? Is anything like a progressive stance compatible with such atavistic images? Is there not a tacit repudiation of a different style of critique – the sort leveled by (say) the peripatetic eye of a Walter Benjamin at our urban Arcades? Politically perhaps Hannah Arendt had it right: “Flight from the world … can always be justified as long as reality is not ignored but acknowledged as the thing that must be escaped.” (“Men in Dark Times”). More broadly, might it not be that the bland space of the cabin, like the yellow pad, or the laptop screen, is something of a neutral ground making room for the refiguration or transformation of the real – not a flight in the sense of repudiation of the real, rather relief from the pressure of its organizing principles.

Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series.

One does not have to be a Thoreau or a Rousseau for one of these modest spaces to supply what is needed to write. Identification with nature is not required (if indeed it were possible); a certain harmony with nature is already broken by putting pen to paper. And would one really seek harmony with nature if one were privy to the ruthless struggles being played out under every rock? The roof of the cabin, the door, the window are all designed to keep nature at bay. The flat surface of the desk, the laptop screen, the artificial light all bear witness to the necessity to subordinate nature’s spontaneous irregularity, to fashion a little Versailles.

Between world and word there is both a bridge and a chasm. Sometimes it seems that nothing could be more natural than speaking or writing. And yet we know that a manifesto, a book, even a well-turned, well-timed phrase can change the world. Writers are at times, as Pope decried, fools in dunce’s caps. But they can also be magicians, conjuring other worlds, brave new possibilities. The cabin is one culturally powerful image of that semi-detached space in which those creative discontinuities are spawned. It seems to hold a secret, but behind the first there hides another. If the first secret is that to write, one needs a blank sheet of paper, or a blank screen, the second secret, the secret of the cabin, is that one does not strictly need a mountain or a shack at the end of a trail, off the grid. Rather, a table, a chair, somewhere simple, free of distraction. For some, even a cupboard in an office building no-one is using that day will do. But bring your noise-cancelling headphones just in case.



David Wood is a philosopher, earth artist, and a professor of philosophy and European studies at Vanderbilt University. He is completing a writer’s cabin at the end of a trail at Yellow Bird Sculpture Park in Woodbury, Tenn. A response to this piece by the Edinburgh philosopher John Llewelyn can be found here.

