Is there anyone out there that enjoys being locked in a room and views the time alone as an opportunity for growth and learning? There are not many books on the subject of the delights of remaining at home week after week. Then I discovered Xavier de Maistre's "A Journey Round My Room," a wonderful, amusing, and hopeful faux-travel memoir published in 1790 when the author was serving a 42-day house detention sentence after a fight with another officer.
Please read Chapter 1 to 5 of Xavier de Maistre's, A Journey Round Room: Selected Works of Xavier de Maistre, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New York: New Directions Books, 1994), or listen to the audio below:
Xavier de Maistre's "A Journey Round My Room" is an underappreciated travelogue written while he was under house arrest in Turin, Italy. This anti-travel book penned in 1790 gives unlikely relief to individuals suffering from lockdown. De Maistre's journeys are described in microcosm with the magic of the Grand Tour: a few walks around the bed, a wistful glance at an engraving, and then on to the armchair. Many critics have praised de Maistre's self-awareness, notably Susan Sontag. Sontag comments, “among the effortlessly brilliant writers of [modernity]. … His masterpiece, A Journey Round My Room, is one of the most original and mettlesome autobiographical narratives ever written.” De Maistre's insight, on the other hand, is that bigger marvels can be uncovered among life's boredoms. He presents vivid lessons for turbulent times with sarcastic side swipes at the grandiosity of trip narratives.
I have just completed a forty-two-day voyage around my room. The fascinating observations I have made and the endless pleasures I experienced along the way made me wish to share my travels with the public…. Words cannot describe the satisfaction I feel in my heart when I think of the infinite number of unhappy souls for whom I am providing a sure antidote to boredom and a palliative to their ills. For the pleasure of traveling around one’s room is beyond the reach of a man’s restless jealousy: it depends not on one’s material circumstance.
"A Journey Round My Room" is a fantastic example about the need of careful observation and developing skills in seeing and analyzing interior spaces, as well as the material things and works of art located within it. We now all struggle to focus on a single object for more than a few seconds in our digital world. Consider your furnishings; become lost on your walk to the armchair; stay motionless, engaging in behavior we'd rather keep hidden from inquisitive eyes. Reading de Maistre helps us understand the symbolic quality of interiors and furniture types. Try to focus on de Maistre's description of his own pink and white bed. He describes the bed as a kind of theatre in which a sequence of life's pleasures and sorrows are experienced from the perspective of a young soldier living in the late eighteenth century—a place where a man “takes a virtuous wife in his arms.”
Is it not in a bed that a mother, drunk with the joy of her child’s birth, forgets her pain? It is here that the imaginary pleasures, the fruits of fancy and hope, come to stir us. … A bed witnesses our birth and it witnesses our death: it is the ever-changing theater where the human species enacts, by turns, engaging dramas, ridiculous farces, and horrible tragedies. It is a cradle decked with flowers—it is love’s throne. It is a sepulcher.
This gem of a literature provides an alternate excursion for us during this quarantine, unable to travel. We are all forced to embark on such journeys, armed only with our pyjamas and the ability to observe. If surviving in tiny quarters was not difficult enough, de Maistre's wise advice is to transform loneliness into adventure.
Consider how you navigate your home from one room to another. What do you think you see? What keeps you awake at night? Give an example of a view from a window of your house using your memory. Describe one beautiful and one unattractive thing, and perhaps something that is old, and something that is new in your room. Where did it originate? Do you attach it with any memory or association? Let us know by commenting below.
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