How to Travel the World During the Pandemic
When my architectural history courses shifted to an online format last spring, I quickly began to search for readings that would speak to my students marooned in their apartments and dormitories. It seemed unnecessarily cruel to make students read the preexisting articles in the syllabus that depicted the pleasures of public life, including those about the crowded spaces of the department store, playground, and opera house.
I soon discovered there are not many readings about the pleasures of staying indoors week after unrelenting week. I considered assigning Franz Kafka’s unfinished short story “The Burrow” (1931), which describes the narrator’s efforts to create a perfect series of maze-like tunnels that would offer protection from outside dangers. I also thought of using Ottessa Moshfegh’s, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), a novel about a recent Columbia University graduate who attempts to drug herself into a year of semi-sleep following the death of her mother and father.
But the depressing qualities of these readings, along with so many more I considered for the spring semester, led me to ask: are there any writers who actually celebrate being sequestered in a single room and see the time alone as a period for growth and learning?
Figure 1. Photo illustration by William Littmann, 2020.
Then I remembered Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room, a marvelous, funny, and optimistic faux-travel memoir written in 1790 when the author was serving a 42-day house-arrest sentence in Turin following a duel with another officer (figure 1).[1] Voyage Around My Room is a testament to making do with one’s current living conditions as well as a lesson on the pleasures of close looking at the interior of our own living spaces. I hoped my students would appreciate de Maistre’s approachable and informal writing style as well the book’s brevity—as each of the forty-two chapters are rarely more than two pages in length. In addition, assigning parts of Voyage Around My Room would give my students contact with one of the most important (yet little-known) literary works of the late eighteenth century. Many critics, including Susan Sontag, have celebrated de Maistre’s self-conscious memoir. Sontag placed him “among the effortlessly brilliant writers of [modernity]. … His masterpiece, Voyage Around My Room, is one of the most original and mettlesome autobiographical narratives ever written.”[2]
“They may have forbidden me to travel through a city, one place, but they left me the entire universe: infinity and eternity are at my command.”
At the beginning of his memoir, de Maistre argues that all of us, no matter our health or economic condition, can travel the world while remaining in our own rooms:
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.[3]
Voyage Around My Room was written at a time when elite white men still felt they needed to enjoy a Grand Tour of Europe in order to become cultured individuals. De Maistre’s journey is a witty send-up of Grand Tour literature—one in which the most dangerous event described is when the author’s dog runs headlong into his armchair with such force that it throws de Maistre onto the floor, and he is left with “ringing in my head, and a sharp pain in my left shoulder” and the armchair “capsized on top of me.” De Maistre writes that he is loath to mention the accident “so as not to discourage others from travel.”[4]
De Maistre captures the monotonous detail found in writings about the Grand Tour, arguing that when “one sets off to climb Mont Blanc … one never fails to describe with utmost precision the most trifling circumstances, the number of people and mules, the quality of the provisions….”[5] Thus, Voyage Around My Room similarly contains detailed reports of the contents of the drawers in his writing table (inkstand, paper, quills, and sealing wax), the contents of his library (including a volume describing the voyages of Captain Cook), and the amount of mattresses on his bed (two in number, which he describes as “voluptuous”).
De Maistre also mimics the travel literature of the time by describing the serendipitous way he explores his room combined with the geographic specificity found in many Grand Tour narratives:
My room is situated at forty-five degrees latitude, ... It runs from east to west, and forms a rectangle that is thirty-six paces around, keeping well nigh to the walls. My voyage, however, will encompass a great deal more; for I shall often walk across it lengthwise and breadthwise, and diagonally too, following no rule or method. —I shall even zigzag this way and that, and follow every line possible in geometry, if necessary.[6]
“Voyage Around My Room is a wonderful tool to help students learn about the value of close looking”
Teaching Close Looking
Voyage Around My Room is a wonderful tool to help students learn about the value of close looking and develop their skills to observe and analyze interior space and the material objects and works of art found inside a room. In our digital age, all of us now have difficulty focusing for more than a few seconds on a single object. In the classroom, I have tried to develop assignments to help students learn to concentrate on an object or painting so that they can discover the details of its form and materiality, as well as consider how it might represent the people who produced or used the object. To this end, citing one example, I ask students to spend thirty minutes in class replicating architectural objects in clay, including rooftop almena from Teotihuacan or particular objects associated with the global trade of the Early Modern Period. In a world where we endlessly click through a series of virtual images and videos, there is value in asking students to take a deep breath and focus on a single artifact and contemplate how it relates to the larger culture. The overall goal of such assignments is to show students that a combination of knowledge of historical background with the act of carefully inspecting an artifact produces well-rounded narrative about culture—especially about people who might not have left historical records. As Peter N. Miller wrote in 2014, “Objects speak to us through the memories that belong to them—the more we know of the lives they have lived, the more loudly they speak.”[7]
Figure 2. Illustration from Xavier de Maistre, A Journey Round My Room, trans. Henry Attwell (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1871).
In Voyage Around My Room, de Maistre shows us through his days of confinement the value of cataloging and closely describing the objects in his room (figure 2). De Maistre offers so much detail about the contents of the space, including its six chairs, two tables, writing desk, mirror, rugs, bed, paintings, sculpture, and curtains, that I could easily ask my students to illustrate the appearance of de Maistre’s room. The furniture, in particular, is described by de Maistre with a Proust-like sense of detail. He depicts the organization of the single desk drawer that holds letters from friends (“the oldest are arranged in several packets according to their dates”) or the morning rays of sunlight shining through curtains that “advance along the white wall as the sun slowly rises; the elm trees outside my window break them up into a thousand different ways.” When examining a painting of a woman minding sheep in the Alps, he takes time to describe the kinds of trees that surround the shepherdess as well as the nearby “Lavender, thyme, anemones, and centaurea [that]…make up the bright carpet on which her sheep roam.”[8]
Reading de Maistre also helps students understand the symbolic quality of interiors and furniture types. In my history of architecture survey, I have moved away from teaching buildings and interiors through chronology only, avoiding the common march of styles. Instead, I have developed the use of a case study approach where we explore each week the meaning and use of a particular room or object found within interior space—thus lectures and student presentations might tackle the multiple meanings of a bedroom or kitchen from antiquity to modern times or the long history of such objects as the bed, toilet, and refrigerator in the Americas, Europe and Asia. With the case study of the bedroom in mind, I asked my students to pay attention to the way de Maistre describes his own pink and white bed. He writes that the bed is a kind of theatre in which, from the perspective of a young soldier living in the late eighteenth century, a sequence of life’s pleasures and disappointments are experienced—a place where a man “takes a virtuous wife in his arms.” The author then goes on to write:
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.[9]
In Voyage Around My Room, de Maistre teaches students that we can travel to exotic locations just by looking at reproductions of the world found in prints and paintings. Several chapters are dedicated to the art that hangs in his room—and these become transcendental windows that transport him to exotic or even supernatural locations, while the figures within come alive and offer companionship for de Maistre. When looking at a painting of a woman tending a flock of sheep high in the Alps, de Maistre has an intimate conversation with the figure: “Gentle shepherdess, tell me, where is this charming corner of earth that you inhabit? From what distance sheepfold did you set out this morning at daybreak?—May I come there and live with you?”[10]
Learning from De Maistre
Voyage Around My Room can also serve as an example for students of the literature of resistance to incarceration, for the memoir is meant by de Maistre to show to his captors that he cannot truly be imprisoned despite being held in his room. De Maistre shows that one’s own imagination and creativity, as well as books and works of art, can set one free to explore the world despite restrictions on one’s own mobility. In the last day of his house arrest, de Maistre writes as if the lessons he had learned from his time in his room allowed him victory over his captors:
Today is the day that certain people, upon whom my fate depends, presume to give me back my freedom—as if they had taken it away from me! As if it were in their power to steal it from me and prevent me from traveling, as I please, the vast, ever open space before me!—They may have forbidden me to travel through a city, one place, but they left me the entire universe: infinity and eternity are at my command.[11]
In the end, my students welcomed reading excerpts of Voyage Around My Room and the lessons it offered to all of us still stranded in our homes and apartments. They seemed to value de Maistre’s make-do and anti-authoritarian attitude and how he used his imagination to travel the world despite his house arrest. One student noted how, after reading Voyage Around My Room, he similarly made his own room come alive using much of the same tone and style of de Maistre, writing:
As the author Maistre described his bed layout, my bed is also under a bright window, through which is a quiet wood. It is very pleasantly situated, and the earliest rays of the sun [shine] upon my curtains. I like to sit by the window and enjoy everything that nature gives me. Cooking, watching movies, learning and [spending time] with my puppy are the only things I can do every day.
NOTES
[1] The original title of the memoir is Voyage Autour De Ma Chambre (originally published in 1794), and translators have rendered the title into A Journey Round My Room or Voyage Around My Room. The quotations and page references in this article are from a recent New Directions translation: Xavier de Maistre, Voyage Around My Room: Selected Works of Xavier de Maistre, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New York: New Directions Books, 1994). All references to page numbers in this essay are from this publication. Click here for the online and free version of the Voyage Around My Room. For biographical information about de Maistre, see the excellent introductory essay and author timeline in de Maistre, Voyage Around My Room, vii-xiv, 207-210.
[2] Susan Sontag’s quote about Voyage Around My Room, appears in Lapham’s Quarterly and on the back cover of the New Direction edition of the memoir noted above. Other notable discussions of Voyage Around My Room include, Marcel Theroux, “Being Stuck in a Room for Six Weeks was the Starting Point of One of History's Strangest Explorations,” The Telegraph, April 11, 2020, and Daniel Elkind, “Travels in the Interior,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 9, 2016.
[3] de Maistre, Voyage Around My Room, 3.
[4] Ibid., 46-47.
[5] Ibid., 28.
[6] Ibid., 8.
[7] Peter N. Miller, “How Objects Speak,” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 11, 2014.
[8] de Maistre, Voyage Around My Room, 9.
[9] Ibid., 10.
[10] Ibid., 37-38.
[11] Ibid., 81.
