On the Move II

Is a house like a Greek chorus? Doesn't your home seem to speak to you sometimes? Reminding you of the past, singing your future fate, warning you to turn back at every photo, every crack, every faded patch. Recording your progress. And do we move houses so often because we are afraid of stagnating, of having our last house determine our fate by holding onto us? When we move house, do we redesign our future too? Or in buying a new house, are we just purchasing a new illusion for ourselves: namely, the renewed illusion of freedom?

On the Move

After a year of moving around, from London to Paris to Berlin and back, I've been thinking about the way that surroundings affect people. I am convinced, now, that habitats influence a person's state of mind, that they affect and reflect the shape of the human soul. A home's aesthetic is a person's aesthetic: the glow from the very walls infuses into a person and emits memories at them. I'm not quite saying that Naturalism runs riot. Instead, I'm arguing that a sticky surface - a kind of memory bank - is enacted by each wall.

Lacking a home, I have used the internet as a wall: a sticky surface, a memory bank, a permanent place in my itinerant lifes, which will welcome me whenever I need to return, whenever I feel sad or nostalgic or homesick.

I've been itinerant the whole year, and when you move around a lot, the fung shui of foreign flats and rooms has a different effect. Surroundings affect the traveller profoundly, since they are very different to home. Travellers don't get so attached to the places they stay in, because they know they're moving, but these places sometimes affect travellers more than inhabitants, who have gotten used to their hometown's aesthetic and are no longer affected by it.