Minding the House

It was August in San Francisco. A thick layer of fog lay over the city and the sky did not open up all day. I sat on the floor in front of the white enameled gas stove in our apartment, occasionally turning on the oven to warm up. I was reading, perhaps a Russian. Perhaps Turgenev’s First Love. It must have been the weekend or I would have been at work.

What sustained me in the early 1970’s were my sister Solveig, with whom I was sharing an apartment; great literature, with which I was filling in the gaps in my education; and the city itself. Of course I longed for warm summer nights, and we did get a few in the fall. But the city was home, in endlessly varied ways.

We lived in a one bedroom apartment, which meant two large rooms, one for each of us, a kitchenette and bathroom. We were experimenting. What did one really need? A mattress on the floor, or a studio couch under the bay window covered with an Indian bedspread, a kitchen table. I lived in several similar apartments. If we needed something, we went off to Busvan on Clement Street for a second-hand version. Or to Cost Plus for exotic China or house plants.

We were transients, never settling, moving between friends, coffee houses, music venues, at home in the city. We didn’t own cars. We took the public buses and trams, which made all of the city accessible. San Francisco was also small enough you could walk to parks or other places you wanted to go. I often found an apartment close enough that I could walk to work.

It was an experiment in living communally, no person having more than the next, people from everywhere, drawn by the beautiful city. It felt like freedom. Work was a constant; we knew we had to butter our own bread. But beyond that time and space were ours.

When we get out past our skins, there is our house, and past that, our neighborhood. For us in those early days, a house wasn’t a place to keep things. It was a place to dream, plan, talk, think. It was inhabited by memories, by all the things that had happened there. A new apartment  always felt empty until it had been filled up with habits, friends, dinners, comings and goings. We learned where the light fell in those rooms, where to make ourselves comfortable.

Our houses, apartments, our external shells, are a protection, an extension of the self we have developed. They mirror physically the way we think. And thus they should be treated with respect. As we try not to fill our bodies with junk food and harmful substances, so should we treat the shells in which we live. They are just as much at risk!

Michael Pollan’s latest book, A World Appears [published 2026], which examines theories of consciousness, looks into the fact that our bodies, emotions and feelings very much affect how we think. This reminds us that in creating our homes, our physical surroundings, we are making the spaces in which our minds dwell. Pollan suggests that capitalism intrudes more and more on our consciousness. We need to think in terms of hygiene for our minds, keeping our consciousness clean and unpolluted. “How can we protect a space of mental freedom?” asks Pollan.

I have always been interested in houses. My mother told me that as a little kid I always begged “to see the upstairs,” if we went visiting. I collected house plans from women’s magazines, planning the house I would one day build. But it turned out I have lived in cities, and instead of collecting everything in an isolated house, as if in a ship on the sea, my needs, plans and mental energy have been dispersed across those cities.

We have grown more settled over the years, but I still ask myself, what do we really need? We now have some furniture, though never so much it obscures living space. Beyond excellent cookware, we have almost no appliances. And we still use public transportation whenever possible. Even in Los Angeles, it is increasingly available. It makes the city feel all of a piece, easy to move about in, the world at our feet. LA is much more spread out than San Francisco, but we have marked out a piece of it which has become home.

I believe most of us should live in cities, so as to leave as much of the world as possible to its natural inclinations. It does mean that our choice of a place to live is existentially important, allowing us to make space for mental freedom. We all live so differently, though our human needs are similar. Cities make it possible for us to live side by side.

These days, I mind the house, the apartment, as Don is so outgoing. We both use our place as a haven of freedom, leaving space for our own thoughts, for reflection and wonder, for the selves we have become. Modern life is tempting, offering comfort and endless ways to fill up time. We do not fall prey to subscriptions. And when we do succumb to the need for an ice cream sundae, we go out to a shop, so as not to give ice cream a habitual place in our home!