Kitchen

(5.95 m2)

 

Perched on the Threshold

The only way to enter the main room is through 1 small doorway of proportions so narrow (80 cm wide) and low (1.85 m) that the obese and the gigantic are essentially barred from entry: those above a certain height have to bend their heads down to slip through this air lock of sorts. Ideally, most rooms found in private dwellings would have 1 such vestibule that impedes access. The air of mystery conjured up by such thresholds, which don’t open into the room itself so much as they arouse a desire to enter, would make our cramped homes far more attractive. Once I have the space to do so, I take a deep breath—and it really does matter to me that this space not be crude, accessible at a glance, like modern and industrial lofts; rather, it should be curved, meandering, circular, winding, oblique, sophisticated, sinuous. The ideal apartment (I can’t say “dream apartment” because I rarely dream) would be just such a false labyrinth.

This streamlined portico, framed by artificial lintels to hide wiring, lacks a door. It’s essential to suggest some demarcation between the apartment’s 1st section, with its thoroughly utilitarian rooms (entryway + bathroom + toilet), and its 2nd, more “personal,” even more social section (kitchen + living room + office), so I’ve resorted to my loyal curtain. Thus, 1 simple piece of beige linen marks this point of passage, like the indent beginning a new paragraph, a line break lineating a poem, the outline shaping a floor plan. In winter, I bolster the curtain with a 2nd piece of fabric tacked directly to both sides of the threshold, as a way of keeping out the drafts that would otherwise set the cloth fluttering as they blow through. This barrier also splits my home nicely in 2 in terms of temperature: zone 1, bereft of all heating, plummets to arctic atmospheres, while sector 2, accorded several electric radiators, enjoys regulation temperatures. The rest of the year, just 1 of these “precious” cloths (€2.25 each) remains so as to function as a divider; and when, inevitably, I lose interest in them entirely, I take down both curtains, these movable screens that appeal more to my theatrical sensibilities than to any compartmentalizing tendency. The curtains function as a cheap yet convincing way to imply an illusory grandeur; their true value is in providing a backdrop even as they reinforce each room’s autonomy: I can’t help but compare their usage to that habit some aristocrats of centuries past had of concealing their paintings and their scandals—most notoriously The Origin of the World—behind curtains.

I admit I dislike this linen cloth’s coarse, cut-rate look—its rough texture, its beige color akin to canvas stretcher bars or couch frames. Shoddily hung to make its removal easier, it’s folded over on top and on each side; down at floor level it lets through some centimeters’ worth of air, giving the whole setup the feel of a campground. Actually, giving my apartment a “vacation home” feel is 1 of my secret goals … I’d insist on my imaginary country home being a grand work of art, but the work of building it from the ground up will always have to remain a fantasy, a pipe dream, even as I must come to terms with the fact that all the work of renovating my actual apartment has only made it, in my mind, a 2ndary, anterior work of art. If I don’t have the means to alter the underlying structure, then I’ll just indulge my daydreams by dressing it up a bit.

The Stone Lion

Push aside the cloth, step across the threshold, and on your left, at shoulder height, there’s no missing the stone lion’s head nailed to the jamb. Formerly part of an ancient fountain, wherein jets of water spurted through its leonine maw, this regal lion presides over the entrance to the inner circle of my apartment, it roars its welcome to visitors just as mezuzot on the doorposts of Jews’ houses and on their gates decree the divine blessing over their homes. Meeting the stony stare of this ocher-brown lion, whose eyes seem to bore through time, yet whose cruelty has 0 effect, strips me of all character. It scowls at me, no matter what I do; I leave it to its wall. I know it’s there. Watching. Nailed to 1 white pillar, it feels fairly remote to me, like the statues in a park or on some estate. A cousin to the archetypal Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion, it delimits my living room with a frozen roar: ars gratia artis. He who dares cross the doorway under such favorable auspices reaches the 2nd part of the apartment, the largest in surface area, some ⅔ of the total square meterage.

The Mainness of the Room

The main room stretches from the open-plan kitchen (in French we call them américaine) on the left to the living room on the right. Its size is arresting. The doubling here swiftly offsets the narrowness of the apartment’s 1st part in 1 way that reminds me of … a sonnet! The sonnet is a poem that, in moving from quatrains to tercets, decreases its number of lines (from 8 to 6) as it increases its number of rhymes: its palette of sounds expands (3 instead of 2). My apartment is configured in such a way that 1 moves directly from the narrow realm of the hallway-entryway canyon to the expansive living-room-kitchen-office-bedroom prairie.

I’ve often noticed an appreciable satisfaction on the faces of visitors entering this space, as must have been the case for myself as well on the lucky day I saw it for the 1st time. Whereas crossing the hallway-entryway provokes little reaction, considering the site’s narrowness (accentuated by the fact that everyone has to walk behind each other, sometimes even in single file)—my visitors have completely different looks on their faces when they enter the living room, expressions revealing their realization of my apartment’s true potential. This reversal of fortune, this raising of spirits along with the apartment’s square meterage informs visitors that they’ve reached a world far more welcoming than anticipated.

The Multivalence of the Space

This sudden abundance of space that comes into sight, much like the sky opening up, or a plain, or some other perspective long obstructed by whatever obstacle, is the result of many conditions, chief among them the fact that 1 single glance now encompasses 4 areas at once (the kitchen and the living room, and opening onto the bedroom and the office): 1’s field of vision is widened by the configuration of these rooms, by the depths they suggest, as well as the relatively immense lines and surfaces now on display—the walls, for example, and the wooden floor, and the broad and perfectly smooth white ceiling. Here, at last, it’s possible to walk, to take 100 steps, to venture across a territory that may not be objectively large but which “becomes” large perceptually—here I can cross the room diagonally, cut a path toward my office, stretch out on the floor, or reenact the best moments of the 1982 France–West Germany soccer semifinal using some crumpled-up paper as a ball.

CH (2.45 m)

Ceiling height is a measure of our psychological strength; it determines our hopes.

By Design

Since this book’s design follows my apartment’s, I’ll start with the left side of the room, which is taken up by the open-plan kitchen.

Where the Problem Lies

Open-plan kitchens are found in so many Parisian apartments not because people want them, as such, but because space here comes at such a premium: our paltry square meterage doesn’t allow for a stand-alone room devoted to cooking—notwithstanding those especially bourgeois apartments I have now abjured—so plopping down all the components of 1 kitchen in 1’s living room takes care of both spaces in 1 fell swoop. And yes, perhaps the space usually reserved for the kitchen gets opened up in certain lofts for camaraderie’s sake, rather than by necessity—the ancient Greek megaron must have had its charms; similarly, I can’t deny the potential attraction of open-plan kitchens—but this was by no means the intention I had in mind when I agreed to put all my appliances in my living room. Speaking for myself, I’d rather not have an open-plan kitchen at all. Originally intended for working-class housing, such arrangements have now taken on positive and state-of-the-art and even posh connotations, spurring their implementation in apartments where the concept really only serves to mask the reality of being ridiculously cramped. Thus, what began as a purely practical measure is now presented to us, through linguistic legerdemain, as an incontrovertible advantage. Distorted by this trickery, what ought to be simple, utilitarian kitchens see their most obvious quality, their paucity of space, become their least acknowledged 1: true luxury, then, must be space itself—space pure and simple.

In a Station of the Métro

The apparition of these ads in the crowd at the massive Auber métro station, in which we see a minuscule studio apartment transformed into a palatial residence with the wave of a wand, the Murphy bed unfolding into a mezzanine, the living room apportioned into a loggia … But modularity is a lie, particularly there. How patronizing to advertise furniture for small spaces in such an enormous 1!

Hallway on the Chopping Block

Likewise, real estate agents showing off these teensy-weensy mouseholes like to trot out hackneyed reassurances to the tune of “No hallway, no wasted space!” despite the fact that a nice hallway offers enough perspective to create lovely foreshortenings and illusions of vastness …

Modernist Prayer

My Le Corbusier, give us square meters,

Lead us not into the rabbit-hole of temptation

And deliver us from plywood.

Defeat, American Style

Having forgone a self-contained kitchen—which would have had the advantage of sparing my apartment and my guests all the odors as well as the other more or less respectable components of culinary preparation—I find myself forced to admit that open-plan kitchens do indeed offer certain practical advantages. The irony being that, while we call such setups “American,” in French, I’ve suffered a painfully un-American defeat in acquiescing to this state of affairs: that is, America has invaded my space both culturally and actually, all the while insisting that it’s perfectly natural for consumption to occur on the site of production; indeed, just as natural as taking a bath in a bathroom and going to bed in a bedroom: a narrow logic that draws 0 distinction between eating and dining. Still, considering that I’m not so much a domestic theoretician as a man with a (very flimsy) sense of practicality, I cannot help but admit, too, that pragmatism should always win out over principles that, even if I had the means to realize them, would ultimately prove indefensible. In short, I’m stuck with my “American kitchen” not because I’ve been forced to surrender to any concrete reality but because I think it’s actually quite a successful innovation, in its own way. 1 of the things I was most excited about when I acquired this apartment was just this opportunity to take full advantage of the conditions it would impose upon my natural inclinations: this, anyway, was how a philosopher who lived in a horrible ’70s-era residence in Montparnasse defined a free man.

Problems and Solutions: The Wall

1 way of demonstrating my reverence for keeping functions discrete may be seen immediately in the separating half wall that so clearly delimits this space. The wall, distinctly horizontal and 60 cm tall, starts just 2 paces beyond the entryway and runs 3 meters long, till it abuts the perpendicular wall of the bedroom. In this way the kitchen and the living room are, despite being in the same room, distinctly separate, the “corner-kitchen” (if we want to use such idiotic terminology) being restricted to 1 large rectangle on the left. The idea of this half wall, inspired by a junk-mail interior-decorating catalog, satisfied my taste for clear boundaries and limits, an awfully uncommon predilection these days, since the prevailing tendency, conversely, is to commingle everything in accordance with that peculiar cocktail-party hypocrisy that crowds together all manner of dissimilar things. By contrast, a surrealist apartment where the bathroom is the entryway, where the toilet takes up most of the floor space, and where the bedroom also functions as the living room—that certainly seems like a far more radical challenge than yet another “convivial” kitchen fostering a false sense of community.

To Conceal or to Reveal

Even by myself, being subjected to a perpetual view of my dish rack or dry goods doesn’t rank high on my list of desiderata. Those “sleepers”—the professional term for those kitchen items that usually stay on their shelves, such as ingredients, or, as needed, sponges, dishes, or the toaster—already outnumber those items on permanent display. Far more important is this white plasterboard half wall crowned by a small wood cap (also white), which proves its value in the way it conceals, horizontally speaking, most of my kitchen’s mundane secrets. This half wall’s secret-compartment effect is especially manifest viewed from the living room side, when people are sitting on the couch, for example, and so can only see, from that angle, the kitchen’s prettiest or, anyway, least offensive elements—for example the white wall, the dark backsplash tiles, the glass objects. All questions about the organization of an open kitchen can therefore be simplified to a single question: to conceal or to reveal? Is it better to deck out 1’s kitchen in grand style, even if that means overpowering 1’s living room space, or to try to hide every trace of its true purpose? I’ve opted to lean toward the latter solution, which in my case means depending on 2 primary tactics: 1st, to flagrantly refuse kitchen furnishings up above the half-wall line, such as hanging cabinets, which would advertise the space’s purpose far too violently; and 2nd, to keep all those high and so visible surfaces scrupulously tidy. This last point clearly depends on an exacting lifestyle.

Spatial Progression

Immediately to the left of the doorsill 1 small wall extends 107 cm, perpendicular to the long main wall forming 1 of the room’s sides. That’s the corner of the sink and its dish rack. Along this wall runs 1 copper gas pipe (painted white) in an eccentric, geometric, yet free-form path of vertical drops and hairpin turns. Visible pipework has long been an eyesore for neoconservative aesthetes and other idolaters of art for art’s sake, according to whom all indication of materiality, all exposition of underlying structures, ought to be banned. There’s never been any shortage of vituperative jeremiads against the Eiffel Tower and the Centre Pompidou, which make a splendid exhibition of their organs and iron piping, offending the classical credo that “true art is in the concealment of art.” My eccentric pipe is, in its own way, a culmination of those very qualities of both Eiffel’s edifice and that of Piano and Rogers. Protruding out of the wall from the air vent up above, it disappears into the depths behind the sink.

Out of the Odornary

This shadowy mouth, which dissipates odors, is outfitted with 1 electrical fan that can be turned on by flipping a particular switch. I practically never take advantage of this suctioning function, considering that my kitchen is unenclosed and easily ventilated by the 2 nearby living room windows, which do a far better job of evacuating smells than this “ordinary” appliance ever could. To chase aromas away, all I have to do is open a window; banishing such absurd “ordinary” conveniences is far more difficult. Whenever I get close enough to the fan’s square rocker switch, I can see that its dirty white plastic cover bears several partial inscriptions, like the 1s on Cy Twombly’s canvases: ARRËT [sic], VITESS [sic], and VMC, an acronym standing for who knows what.

Fascinating!

Below this switch is another 1, controlling the light on the wall just above the sink. This wall plate is upside down, a detail that would be invisible to the naked eye but for a small, flipped Legrand logo. I would deduce that the electrician who redid my wiring had bad eyesight.

Mastering the Art of French Tiling

Coming back down to eye level, 1 of the most beautiful decorative achievements in my apartment emerges: the bottle-green tiling that surrounds the sink. These tiles, made elegant by their slightly indented texture and bearing all the tiny defects inherent in artisanal craftsmanship that mass production unfeelingly stamps out, were installed incrementally as I made successive visits to the tile factories over by the boulevard Richard-Lenoir, itself named after that grand 1st-Empire manufacturer. This deep, dark, practically black green, called bottle green, is quite unlike any of the colors usually found in kitchens. Selecting tiles is 1 of the many exhilarating decisions to make when putting together a room. The hatred I harbor for all those sandstone or pastel-colored (melba pink) tiles with disgusting floral patterns 1 finds arrayed in kitchens is perfectly offset by this dark green with its dull reflections and manifold irregular gleams. All it takes is a scratch to show that the veins of faux marble pattern are merely painted on, but nothing of the sort occurs here: my tiles in “Edgar Allan Poe” green (as I’ve christened it) have all the mystery and depth of an antikitchen. The tilers I hired scoffed at my choice of color, but that simply proves how right I was. Underscored and overscored and sidescored by 1 white grout, these 125 squares measuring 10 cm × 10 cm each adorn the wall in such a perfect and artistic way that I never tire of looking at them, of devoting all the care I can to keeping them as lovingly clean as they deserve to be: wiping a damp sponge soaked in cleaning products over their appreciative faces puts me in a state approaching ecstasy.

Neutralize Your Kitchen

Neutralizing my kitchen’s effect on my apartment was my goal in conceptualizing this room on account of which I feel equal parts disdain and impotence. Disdain because I’d say eating is pretty low in my personal ranking of essential daily activities; impotence because I barely know how to cook, and, well, this explains that. Since the room already has to fulfill 2 functions, there’s no chance I’d ever give precedence to the more parasitical function. Which is exactly why everything, or just about, is hidden away by my fantastic half wall.

Imperial Kitchen

I actually wonder if the phrase cuisine américaine, which already hints at some kind of vast, untamed territory, doesn’t conceal, behind its apparent conviviality, the implicit aim of invading our living rooms, the better to colonize them. If so, these American kitchens chew up and spit out all Gallic attempts at hospitality—just as the Wild West pioneers hunted down “redskins” to impose their own spatial, culinary, and domestic dominion.

Thomas Cooking

And this is how 1’s apartment proves to be discreetly political, its layout dictated by social processes practically carved into its very moldings. I’ve known bachelors so wholly enthralled by life outside their apartments’ walls that they don’t even have a way to heat up a little snack at home, and then the converse situation, bourgeoisie who’ve sanctified their salons to the point that no exterminating angels are needed to keep them at home, or else social climbers so drunk on sheer space they don’t bother to install a single bookshelf. Nothing is more enlightening than those TV shows about people’s houses, where everybody can see how the “déco” only reveals the cosmic emptiness beneath all interior adornment. This kitchen I’ve cooked up, a massive failure as far as sophisticated layouts go, dashes all domestic hopes; it’s as much a blight on human dignity as those package tours on which Thomas Cook built his name.

Site Comments

“So, you prefer bourgeois closed-off kitchens to American open-plan kitchens?”

“Pass me the navarin of lamb, please.”

4 Subspaces

If we follow the side wall that forms the apartment’s (and even the building’s) outer boundary, we can delineate 4 successive subspaces: the sink unit, the stove, the shelves along the chimney shaft, and the perpendicular countertop at the back, all of which I pass, again and again, pacing, like a starving man or a waiter.

Basal Knowledge

The sink area, 60 cm deep by 1.10 m wide, is made out of a white waterproof plastic material that puts up with all sorts of culinary abuse. In this block sits the sink itself, carved out of white enamel, 1 strip of plastic countertop on its left and 1 larger swath on its right, which accommodates my metallic dish rack. A sink’s depth, derived from the measurements of the body washing the dishes or preparing food, is calculated thanks to a rationalist program that determines the dimensions of furniture based on the activities for which they were intended: in this case, 86 cm deep. But just as literature always escapes the paper on which it’s written, life escapes mere geometry. These measurements navigate the discrepancy between upright and downbent postures by putting the sink at lower-abdomen level—which only means that our nurturing sinks wind up, for men and women alike, at the level of our genitals, which are protected here by the curve of the rim, the raised lip of the plastic superstructure. No doubt it’s an act of sublimation when kitchen counters and human crotches rub against 1 another—but what of dishwashing? Can dishwashing be sensual? Sleazy old macho caricatures depict working women as instruments of pleasure, aprons covering their fronts but leaving their derrières bare … (As for me, I always leave my cotton apron draped on the half wall, ready to use.) Washing dishes certainly doesn’t strike me as particularly erotic, but, then again, isn’t eroticism precisely the abrupt explosion of tedium into passion?

Little Doubles

Having been deprived of 1 of those double sinks made available by our society of abundance, I find myself imagining, again, that material comfort must take the form of a general duplication of space (double bedroom, 2nd office, 2nd bathroom, etc.). The only doubles to be found in my apartment, however, are of things that, themselves, take up no space at all (pens, USB drives, nail scissors, etc.).

Realist Dish Rack

To the right of the sink, all open space has been fully occupied by my dish rack. As far as is possible, I try to keep my dish rack free of dishes, just as I try to avoid leaving any of them to steep in my sink, as it looks far more beautiful when bereft of all encumbrance, its tines blanched like my teeth and gleaming like the small amount of moisture in my mouth. If the dish rack were allowed to become overloaded—and it does often threaten to reach that stage, since, even though I live alone, I use an inexplicably large number of dishes each day, pulling out plate after plate, going through all my cutlery again and again, using the equivalent of a restaurant’s entire tableware stock over the course of 4 daily meals—the heap of dishes there would form a mound of at least 30 cm in height and thereby obscure my beautiful bottle-green wall. (Thus do we find ourselves hurtling relentlessly into 1 of those hyperrealist interiors Huysmans so relished in his 1st period.)

Swamplands

But let’s deal with the dish rack properly. It lies on a plastic plateau inlaid with psychedelic blue patterns, its edges raised above the shallow depth of its interior, usually filled with the water dripping from my piled-up dishes. This parallelepiped’s chrome frame and rounded feet look passable enough when the apparatus is empty and thus visible, but the effect is wholly lost when it’s full of dishes. And, actually, the swampy bottom of the plastic plateau beneath it is 1 of the most fascinating areas of my territory. The liquid filth that reigns there is a notorious exception to my predilection for cleanliness: this moldering water, no matter how many times I pour it out into the sink, reappears incessantly, a brownish sediment that corrodes both the chrome on the rack and the plastic beneath. It’s hard for me to properly explain this swamp that apparently congeals out of clean water dripping off of clean dishes, but clearly all it takes is a little time for stagnation, for depurification to set in, and then, in this stagnation, the slow rusting of the dish rack’s metal, dyeing it a repugnant rubiginous color. Even when the plateau is dry, for example after I’ve come back from a vacation, I’ll find it covered with a sort of earthy layer, like some Mexican mesa or timeworn sierra, while the dish rack’s feet have been partly eaten away. Furthermore, the entire ensemble wobbles on my plastic countertop, which originally wasn’t the case, but as humidity has deformed the plastic to the point of indentation, it’s now lopsided.

So, sometimes, when the plateau is full of standing dishwater, I stir it gently at its edges to watch the stale swamp sludge around. To me this mini-marsh evokes, of all things, the Vietnam War, a troop of marines making laborious progress through a horrific morass that any right-thinking civil servant would have insisted be cleared away immediately; but not I: the potential for a clean dish coming into contact with this fetid mass seems just dangerous enough to intrigue and excite me, like a beautiful shirt’s sleeve dragging through some sauce without its wearer realizing it; and it’s so hard to make out, when the rack is full, this zone threatening to contaminate all that touches it unwittingly. Plates and silverware set in the dish rack never really touch this brackish water, but they do graze it, like prisoners in a cage hanging just above the river where they’ll be drowned.

I know I should act: even so, I remain stupefied, stuck in this domestic quagmire. I’ve let the whole situation deteriorate. In this once-clear water, resignation steeps and stagnates. A just-barely-acceptable filthiness holds sway. Just as my bathroom is a failed Mondrian, so my dish rack is a rotting Le Corbusier.

Lateral Spaces

There’s so little counter space to the left of the sink that it’s impossible to prepare a dish there or even set down food for a moment; everything has to go 3 meters to the right, past the sink, on the perpendicular countertop at the far end of the kitchen. This sheer lack of logic, which forces me to circumnavigate my kitchen just to set down a plate, is physically manifest in this mess to the right of the sink, which, rather than being rectilinear, is askew, shoddily cut by amateur artisans. But I can’t hold this against them: I could hardly have done better in their place (total disdain for handiwork is 1 of those little things that set me apart from all other Frenchmen), and I’m a terrible cook to boot (likewise). And yet, the tiny strip on the left of the sink—counterpart to the dish rack—welcomes, despite its narrowness, my 2 electric-kettle components, its plug-in base and its reservoir, which make up a whole but are easily separable.

I Boil

The kettle, being white, contributes to the room’s chromatic unity; it presents simplicity of form (it resembles a bird’s beak); it’s undeniably cost-effective. In short, it’s 1 of the kitchen utensils I use most often, several times each day, every morning for coffee, most afternoons for tea, and many evenings for infusions. All I have to do is to insert the male plug connected to the base to the female outlet along the wall: in 11 seconds—yes!—the water goes from a weak hiss to a hydroelectric surge, culminating in a torrent of huge bubbles that I annul by unplugging the cord. (Otherwise even my thoughts would start boiling.)

La Phalle

The slender curve of the tap’s shaft—longer, of course, than it is wide—arcs high above the basin, extended at its terminus by the flared mouth from which my potable water flows. Flanked by 2 handles, la phalle is feminine in gender yet masculine in shape, and its hermaphroditism renders it utterly self-sufficient. Due to an installation error, however, my 2 faucet handles have been reversed: the hot water—indicated here by the color red—is on the right, and the cold water—blue—on the left; a harmless mistake, all in all—it would be far more problematic if the red and blue markings were to contradict their universal semiotic usage. La phalle drips; the tap, improperly set in the countertop, wobbles. If the 2 side-by-side handles aren’t twisted firmly shut, 1 teardrop falls into the sink every 8 seconds. Defective objects are often wellsprings of disproportionate rage; a horrible crease contorts my mouth as soon as they threaten to break.

The Cure

But what would the cure be? A plumber? And I’m sitting in the kitchen sink / And the tap drips, drip drip drip drip drip … (from the Cure’s 1st album, 1979, its cover showcasing, on a candy pink background, 1 lit floor lamp, 1 Frigidaire, and 1 vacuum cleaner).

2 Sponges

Situated around la phalle, there’s no missing my sponge and dish soap, the latter as transparent as clear water. The moment when I have to replace a worn-out sponge is a solemn 1: I set the new and the old next to each other and instantly feel my eugenic tendencies playing up. The old, wizened, threadbare, hunchbacked sponge, its scrubbing side gone completely smooth, its hardened yellow pad begging for 1 last use—well, it’s heartbreaking.

Sole Light

60 cm above the sink, perched on the wide swath of white wall, is 1 beautiful rectangular gray aluminum fixture, whose 2 downward-pointing bulbs cast light through 1 translucent plate on what lies below. This modernist adornment, unearthed at a pawn shop that’s since disappeared, is actually 1 of a pair, and usually sold in 2s; at the time, my limited means (I lived with practically 0 money for 15 years) prevented me from acquiring both halves of the diptych. Still, the pawnbroker agreed to break up the set. Only the owner of such an object can be conscious of that missing other half; personally, I’ve never felt the least regret about splitting up the pair. Granted, I can’t see all that well in my kitchen–living room because of this uncoupling, but what is, by contrast, perfectly illuminated is how this purportedly sacrilegious rupture between 2 objects that always come in a pair pulses within me as a sort of sanctification of solitude. This orphan shines enough for 2.

Horror Flick

Whenever I flip the switch, I’m scared of frying my optical nerves. The whole apartment connected to my body, like a laboratory of contraptions all run by a mad scientist.

Lights Out

The fixture’s only failing is that it’s open on the top and so vulnerable to dust falling in from above, which frequently causes the bipin bulbs to short-circuit. When that happens, I have to get up on a chair to pluck them out with a firm but careful yank; and, come to think of it, the dust that I just now blamed is far less likely to be the cause of these frequent burnouts than the installation’s obsolescence—enough so that there’s no use in my trying to blame the shoddy quality of the bulbs themselves, which have lifetimes as short as the candles they’re supposed to replace. When I change them, I take my time about it: inspecting their small oval bubbles of glass, their thin filaments blackened and useless (officially supplanted by energy-efficient light bulbs, nowadays); after which I go to the living room table and set out all the replacement bulbs I have on hand (← ENTRYWAY), small and large, screw-in and pin, 15 and 25 and 75 and 100 watts. Before choosing and installing their replacements, I take 1 last look at these corpses, and I take pictures of them, giving back to them the light they’ve lost.

Cabinetness

Under the sink is 1 double-door, 84-cm-tall cabinet that houses all my dishes. The door handles, 2 small translucent pegs the same green color as my tiles, reinforce the green/white dichotomy of this area, which is echoed by 1 vertical band of tiles on the right-hand side. When the cabinet doors are shut (as is their wont), this setup has an undeniable appeal, much as 1 might see in a midrange interior decoration magazine. My kitchen, clean and tidy, does very well for itself in terms of aesthetics.

Elle Décore

The work of interior decoration magazines consists of presenting houses without any trace of the actual work that must have gone into them. Figures emerge from décors already perfect and whole. Grinning.

Homemaker

The lady of the house used to live in a magazine. When it went out of business, she jumped out the window.

Left

Upon opening the left-hand cabinet door, 2 shelves appear: beyond lies the domain of dullness. In the foreground of the upper shelf 1 set of deep bowls and salad bowls are piled on top of each other, as well as 2 colanders, 1 in hard gray plastic, the other in red stainless steel, the pair not so much adversarial as complementary. On the lower shelf are my plates, stacked in the most logical order: in front are the 1s I use the most, small plates (mismatched, purloined from various sets) as well as the larger flat and deep plates; behind these are towers of oversize 2-toned mauve-and-cream plates in a nouvelle cuisine style, notable mainly for being too inconveniently heavy for my dish rack and too inconveniently big to hold actual food which, once plated, would be as lonely as a castaway on a desert island. In its owner’s hands, of course, the matter of weight isn’t inconsequential, since every plate is a semisculpture. Rather than the groaning weight of sandstone or the alarming fragility of Sèvres china, I like the sturdy texture of traditional ceramic. And, from a decorative point of view, I happen to adore mismatched dishes, which tug at my heartstrings just as much as any historical fresco. There’s something a bit bourgie about having a perfectly matched set of dishes: Guy Degrenne, Christofle, you’re as boring as a handicrafts museum! The bulk of my 12-plate battalion is 19th-century Sarreguemines dishware with a blue-green floral border, found in a Breton flea market (€30). Getting back to the cabinet, all the way in the rear, hidden in 2 boxes and completely inaccessible unless I get on my knees are champagne flutes that I pull out for “special occasions” only: kneeling down for some champagne seems both utterly Protestant and slightly blasphemous, which is why I keep my other glasses, for less Jesuitically unattainable pleasures, closer at hand.

Right

Upon opening the right door, 3 shelves are revealed, each 1 deeper than it is wide. On the middle 1, in a tattered box, is my silverware: forks, spoons, and knives, bought from a penniless family that I suppose must now be silverless. The threat of tarnish always looms: oh, wretched promiscuity! This vast range of flatware, which also includes peelers, kitchen knives, wooden spoons, and 1 spatula, makes me think of the backwoods. (This thicket’s polar opposite, the flat arctic landscape of the stovetop cover, can be found further down in the text and in the → KITCHEN.) Next to the silverware box sit various utensils: 1 rotary cheese grater, 1 meat cleaver, and 1 citrus juicer all higgledy-piggledy in a cake mold, which also happens to hold the instruments needed to make cake. Sometimes I grate cheese using this stainless-steel Mouli grater with handle + small grip that fits nicely in my hand—even back when I was born, in the ’60s, there was already a Mouli grater in the house. Whenever I see someone grating cheese, History loses all its solemnity, its shape, and its logic. Cheese, nostalgia, and modernism melt together in a fondue pot.

Unemployed Knife

As for my meat cleaver (and its custom-molded plastic sheath), only the occasional reappearance of roast beef in my kitchen reawakens it from its torpor each year. Rancière may propose a “distribution of the sensible” in which the dividing line is drawn between binaries, but the number of household items never actually used by their owners would surely overwhelm any such principles if our indissoluble feeling of ownership didn’t already do so. The socialist idea of loaning out 1’s meat cleaver, in particular, is somewhat discomfiting, disturbing, and outright disgusting. Perhaps it’s because of our revulsion toward other people and their bodies that capitalism has proposed an infinite production of individual objects. And thanks to capitalism, this cleaver has joined the ranks of the unemployed, and I can count the number of times I’ve had to use it on the fingers of 1 hand. If I didn’t have it, would I even miss it?

Danger

To my knowledge, this butcher knife is the only real weapon I own; or, rather, considering that it’s possible to weaponize practically any object, it’s the most dangerous. Since I have a certain predilection for weapons (going all the way back to my childhood, when I liked to play with my father’s Browning), I tend to worry about domestic accidents, which are apparently responsible for the deaths of 19,000 people per year, meaning 52 a day, not to mention the 11,000,000 accidents resulting from 1’s surroundings, all of which leads the author of the report I’m copying these statistics from to conclude that “the house is a very dangerous place.” This knife’s 33 cm length (20 alone for the blade) adds to its elegance; all the same, it’s not terribly sharp, and won’t break the skin even when I run my finger along its cutting edge. Its black handle with 3 silver rivets made in the French capital of cutlery (Thiers) is far more imposing than threatening, and although the object’s quality is unimpeachable, it does strike me as rather anodyne, just like the city where it was forged—a city no more renowned than any other given wasteland in the industrial wasteland that is France; and on recognizing how this knife’s only power is in being seen, I worry that Thiers, much like France itself, is nothing more than a knife without a blade—and without a handle too.

Anti-Starck

The 3rd and last specimen in the cake mold, my plastic citrus juicer, is 1 of those things every family in the world owns, consisting of a protruding cone where 1 can press down an orange or a lemon half, and then a reservoir in which to collect the juice. The simplicity of a €2.50 object is fascinating less because of its actual function—I’m lazy and generally drink premade fruit juices—and more because of its negatory aspect: this citrus juicer is anti-Starck. In essence, designer Philippe Starck’s famous Juicy Salif (which costs €19), a sort of aluminum tripod buttressing a metal reamer that’s been made to look like the fruit it’s meant to penetrate, is both pretentious and impractical. With its long, monstrous, mannequin-like legs, it’s vastly inferior to simple family juicers. Every object has its sort of anti-counterpart, its triumphant or failed countermodel—just as this book is an overinflated re-creation of Voyage Around My Room. I’m the anti–Xavier de Maistre!

Eremitism

Above the central shelf, the upper shelf holds coffee cups and teacups, as well as saucers, which are pointless accessories because I don’t need sugar or, consequently, a spoon. Useless objects seem destined, above all, for other people. (Could 1’s eremitic tendencies be flushed out by throwing a proper party?)

Fictive Egg-Holder

My little ceramic egg-holder is green and chipped. As it doesn’t include a wide enough base or rim to hold the egg’s top or the shards of its shell, those inevitably have to be set on 1 plate. I need it despite its inadequacy because it’s the only 1 I have, and soft-boiled eggs are integral to many of my meals. To justify its presence, I need to give this object a little bit of backstory, shoring up its shortcomings with a fable that’ll put it in a better light. So I imagine that it once belonged to an actress who had a man fall in love with her and who, despite his advances, only gave him the cold shoulder. 1 day he plunged his hand into boiling water to prove the ardency of his passion: “A good soft-boiled egg must remain in the water for 3 and a half minutes, madame,” he said—“No,” the cruel beauty retorted: “4.” I relish the story of this fictive egg-holder as much as any auctioneer might.

Cancer Pot Greed Pride

The lowest shelf serves as the receptacle for my 3 gray Teflon-coated pots, nested largest to smallest like Russian dolls. I’ve had these pots for far too long already. There’s no ignoring the white streaks, the signs of wear and tear on their insides. I take care to clean them with the sponge’s soft yellow side, definitely not its green scrubber side—a recommendation fallen from the lips and leaflets of prophets, and followed to the letter because, easily swayed as I am, I’m terrified of getting cancer from ingesting worn-away nonstick coating. I should throw these out, buy new 1s, but I’m too proud of what I have to waste money on that. Greed? Maybe. Sloth? Definitely. Shirts, shapkas, and chocolate are all acceptable in my budget. But pots?!

Scandinavian Coffee

In French, the word café means both a café and the coffee drunk there, which is what leads me to consider how these 2 coffee cups, with their seductively oblong shapes, bearing Scandinavian flower motifs, ambassadors of excellence from the Nordic countries, underscore how those lands have perfected 1 manner of inner life. If exteriors are continuations of interiors, then drinking from 1 of these cups in my apartment immediately transports me to a crowded Scandinavian café—which makes me all the happier that the café I call my kitchen, and the coffee I drink therein, is cozier and less cold.

Cooking Is an Action

In this kitchen, the apartment’s most concretely functional room, the question of the usefulness of art comes to the fore: preparing food calls for so many operations, necessitates such a vast array of commodities and utensils that, unlike my practically empty living room, it’s impossible to simply contemplate the kitchen. In a kitchen, things are always happening. A rind sprouts here, the silverware stands sentry there—everywhere fundamental disorder asserts its rule. Proper management of this space necessitates the employment of a range of activities, continually repeated, which I sometimes wearily watch myself enacting over and over, as if daily life were a matter of gliding round and round without any end in sight: pulling plates out of the cabinet, opening the fridge, filling the kettle, putting ground coffee in the coffeepot, running the faucet, pouring water into the pot, etc. Compared with this horrifying battery of acts, as mind-numbing as the stitch-by-stitch tedium of knitting, working in my office, which boils down to typing on a computer all day, seems Jansenistically peaceful—whereas this proliferation of culinary preparations amounts to an outright orgy of uselessness. The hatred certain artists have nurtured toward culinary matters (Zola insisting that his wife cut his meat, Truffaut excoriating the endless little eateries stealing precious minutes away from shooting—and then Sartre on the other hand eating only at restaurants so as to avoid dealing with feminism) is proportional to the sheer amount of time they take up. The joy of eating is a meager thing considering the laborious complexity and the innumerable steps required to make even a single dish.

Stovetop

To the right of the sink, slightly lower but still following a visible horizontal continuity, snug in a space circumscribed by the protrusion of the chimney shaft, is my Brandt gas range (4 burners) and oven, as well as a well-stocked nook where I keep my pans, “a little extra” hidden beneath the oven proper—it almost touches the floor. I love how these 2 uses (cooking + storage) are so deeply antithetical that nobody could guess at their combination here, since the nook is hidden behind a piece of white sheet metal that seems entirely functionless. I’ve jammed tons of pans and molds in there; I let them enjoy the warmth. It’s worth mentioning that this appliance (which I’ve owned since 1989) has 1 small shortcoming: the latch for that little door has come undone, so it would hit the ground if not for an ingenious wedge that I can’t take any credit for: it’s a cork someone else cut in 2 and glued on.

I try as much as possible to keep the range gleamingly clean, but when it’s dirty from recently completed meals, I fold its metal cover down over the extinguished burners: this is doubly advantageous since the gorgeous tilework extending across this part of the wall is thereby freed from the obstruction that hides it all too often. The relationship between the gleam of this white metal surface and the gleam of the tiles is inherently seductive: it’s not so hard to draw a little beauty out of 1 simple gesture—in this case, the act of pulling the cover down. Sealing an object, safeguarding its power.

Low Heat

Even though I don’t put my culinary skills to much use, I still hold my oven in high esteem. 1 of the clearest signs of low self-esteem is having no oven whatsoever. The French, after all, call vagrants “sans feu ni lieu,” without fire or home. As for the sham otherwise known as the microwave, which just reheats rather than cooking—at best a sort of food radiator, exuding a gloomy office ambiance, calling to mind dismal lunch breaks in room 315—it doesn’t hold a candle to the hearthside ambiance emitted by the word oven. 1 of my friends, who could have become a professional declutterer, since that’s 1 of his chief talents, took pleasure in showing me the absurdity of the 4-burner stovetop, “since we only ever use 2 of them.” A straightforward argument, yes, but altogether too logical for me, and founded upon the flawed assumption that less rather than more heat could somehow lead to a happier home. Abundance isn’t necessarily excess. Living with 2 burners would mean a lukewarm life: I’m hardly living like a baron here, and I probably never will, given the career that I’ve chosen and the kind of literature I’m devoted to, but I’d still like to enjoy a certain level of luxury … a level that a 2-burner stove (which stores do carry) would inevitably diminish.

Lifeline

Like bathtubs and sufficient light, gas stoves are 1 of my absolute necessities for habitation. I hate electric hot plates, which are so slow as to be unusable, so thoroughly indistinguishable—whether hot or cold—as to be dangerous, so ugly as to be fit only for mobile homes. Gas, on the other hand, is a sure thing … though my gas pipes, good until 2013, are, as of this writing, nearing the end of their warranty. It’s rare to come across objects marked with their own expiration dates: 2013, similarly, is when this book will be done. A 10-year-warranty pipe costs €19.99; a lifetime-warranty pipe costs €79.50. Bearing in mind that I’m allotted about 40 more years to live (37, statistically speaking) (unless I commit suicide by gas—a solution I can’t envision myself carrying out, considering the grief it would cause others), it’s certainly in my best financial interests to go for the longer warranty and so save €0.46: but the idea of a “lifetime pipe” is so ominous to me—it reeks of the clinical—that it practically guarantees misfortune. Anyhow, considering the state of my 10-year pipe, I can’t bring myself to believe it’ll really be defunct so soon, but then I likewise can’t bring myself to believe that such an explicit injunction as its warning label could be wrong. My eyes sweep over the object like a vulture over a carcass, and with a heavy silence I ponder just how long it really has left.

To Build 1 Fire

I love turning on the flame, and I love turning on the gas for the stove more than for the oven: the stovetop flame flickers on immediately, while the oven flame is in its “den” and so doesn’t delight the eye. Turning 1 of the knobs and making the pilot spark, I can watch with clear satisfaction as the flame, or rather the flames, since there are several of them on this modern stove, emerge. The yellow “flame of a candle,” as rhapsodized by Gaston Bachelard, is proper to a house; but the blue fire of a gas burner, being less holy, better suits an apartment. A simple joy: lighting all 4 pilots at once, setting them ablaze like an air-raid firebombing. A melancholic joy: the single lit burner of the lifelong bachelor.

Projected Ornament

The Brandt range is snug against the anonymous chimney shaft, the 2 of them conjuring up 2 disparate eras of cooking. Sharing the wall with a perfect symmetry, this conduit sticks out about 30 centimeters, giving a shape to the room that I couldn’t really call picturesque. I’ve considered tearing it down in order to get 1 continuous smooth wall that would be more consistent with the visual identity of my living room—and more practical too, since this bulge takes up space and limits movement—and yet I’ve kept it intact: it adds a kind of projective complexity to this space that mass-produced housing believed it was so wise to eliminate. The shaft’s sharp profile breaks the wall’s clean line and so enhances the room. The ghosts imprisoned within have projected their thoughts outward. I tap my finger on the hollow wall.

Mixed Use

Wedged right in front of the chimney stack, but set low, is 1 small freestanding structure of 3 white shelves for mixed use (storage/housekeeping), a cabinet open to the air. Everything there is on display, but at shin height; I have to squat down to reach anything.

Supplies Demanded

Food is the most perishable supply in a home, its material in perpetual demand by dint of being ephemeral and putrescible, its transitory nature demonstrated too by its ever-changing inventory—albeit simplified in my case, given that I almost always eat the same things. Even though I don’t live in a clan, my relationship to victuals, much like primitive hunter-gatherers’, is characterized by the same repetitive cycles of feast and famine. My foodstuffs are classified by location: these low shelves for typical staples, the Frigidaire for everything fresh.

Feedback

My hand-to-mouth life (hardly ugly but certainly grueling) is regimented by a piece of furniture that wasn’t intended for such regimentation. Originally destined for 1 specific occupation—holding bottles—the narrow dimensions of this fully assembled polyhedron (83 cm × 20 cm) naturally suit its intended function, so its builder was astonished when I rotated it from its proposed verticality to set comestibles inside. This astonishment astonished me in turn; the differences in interpretation that crop up between how people think 1 should organize 1’s home and what 1 actually does tend to multiply as soon as they question 1’s initial decision and 1 feels even more unsure of what 1 actually wants: feedback threatens all shared decisions, each person’s doubts redounding upon the others.

Hardly Fortified Camp

A pronounced destitution hovers over my alimentary domain. Or, to put it another way, there’s never anything to eat at my place. My camp is so scarcely fortified that it would crumble under a siege: the groaning cabinets of well-stocked houses, their jars of homemade preserves, their spice dishes, have all deserted their posts. I don’t live in some domestic fairy tale but rather in a stark universe where every element must sustain itself, drawing its strength from this void of context, just as a white tablecloth would draw color from an orange. Even if I don’t disdain those goods of which my home is bereft, I must be clear that they simply have no place in my constrained universe. As I weigh the quality of such goods against the paltry surface area of my apartment, I don’t see what a big heap of victuals would get me. Gaining a little space is far more important to me than being able to fortify this bunker I might consider my home, so I’ve kept my kitchen lean. This enforced frugality isn’t depressing, as far as I’m concerned; I simply see it as a different way of living, just like any other, trying to keep my stomach out of the equation as much as possible: it’s bad enough that nature already requires me to feed myself an overwhelming 3 times a day (4 if I count my afternoon snack). In such joyless repetition I find a strong argument against the existence of God in this spoilage of the delectable pleasure of eating in its being quadrupled each day rather than simply being doubled. If anything, this would seem to indicate the existence of some false deity unaware of the difference between indulgence and repetition, and who thereby bound humanity to its appetites. It’s hard enough to run errand upon errand—a process that always boils down to fits and starts, stratagems and bursts of willpower—but that difficulty is only multiplied by adding on those chores necessitated by the preparation of meals, which themselves call for pulling out dishes and putting them away again, and then all of the above is made possible in the 1st place only by having answered the endlessly recurring question “What should I eat?”!

From this perspective, Raymond Roussel’s daily challenge—he took all his meals in 1 go, once each day, and had done with them—rather speaks to me; alas, I don’t have his fortitude, and I’d much rather live communally (a prospect I’m certainly drawn to) in a situation where meals would be served at fixed times, prepared by other people, and eaten in a group; I like the idea of degrading the status of food by rationing it out: buying so few groceries is a sort of sardonic rebellion against the purportedly natural order of things. However, I’m far from disdaining food in general; the beauty of all comestibles is in their annihilation.

Narrow Pantry

This shelf for bottles without any bottles stands in for my pantry. Its makeup changes depending on my shopping status: full when it’s holding many newly bought products, empty when it’s time to go to the store. Its very smallness lends itself to starkness, as if the diminutiveness of the whole must be transmitted to its contents. Small furnishings discourage excess: if I bought too much, it would overflow. Indeed, the goods up front are packed in like sardines in order not to spill over, and even then some of them tend to fall and scatter—a carton of raisins, for example—due to the shelf’s modest proportions.

I toy with the idea of putting on a play in which all the action would happen right at the edge of the stage, forcing the actors to perform with the closed curtain right behind them and the orchestra pit right in front: they would barely be able to move their bodies, so we could observe them making the smallest gestures, which would become all the more touching, and so all the more appropriate to the expressive narrowness of humanity.

General Store

In terms of nonperishables, my personal department store is divided into 3 cantons: to the left I have the grocery proper, with its olive oil, canola oil, various spices—including both the classics (pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon) and the occasional fantasia (paprika, cloves, tarragon); in the center, disregarding any overlap due to the lack of intermediate dividers, the “sweets”: tea, flour, honey, Thompson raisins; on the right, a bit of a gray area, where various jars mix with orange blossom petals, pasta, white rice, lentils, semolina, and split peas. Nietzsche, writing about himself as a man in his 40s, threatened by cholesterol, showed how the question of food is a philosophical 1—but don’t infer from this that the scarcity of my reserves amounts to a similar miserabilism on my part. On the contrary, even if I’m hardly a master chef, I still do happen to like nice things, from Debauve & Gallais chocolate to pear mincemeat, from arugula salad to manchego cheese and 1st-cold-pressed olive oil, which, by the way, beats peanut oil hands down, specifically Lesieur-brand peanut oil, the subpar variety that drowned my childhood. I’m downright fascinated by the way certain ingredients can become irretrievably passé; and while I don’t know why peanut oil has become so utterly disreputable, I’m likewise amazed that it ever seemed indispensable.

Alimentary Aesthetics

Now that my friends, who might as well be my unofficial doctors, have converted me to the cult of organic food, I happily welcome semolina, red and green lentils, brown rice, and quinoa into my home—foodstuffs that just a few years ago I would have mocked and scorned. But the time for joking has long passed, and now my health strikes me as no laughing matter. I’m more and more interested (not, I hope, to excess) in nutrition: the original medicine, as everybody knows, rooted in the pleasure of exclusion: banning this or that food from my mouth for all time. Youth, of course, cares not for such details—is unconcerned about what it consumes, barely looking at it, even feeling a 2ndary pleasure at purposely eating 2nd-rate foods; yet there’s an inverse sensuality in eliminating comestibles wholly incompatible with the concept of “self-care” from 1’s diet: processed food, for example. So, yes, I’ve said adieu to butter, sugar, salt, eggs, deli meats, and Nutella—just as my aesthetic diet won’t allow the consumption of such dubious offerings as the works of Coelho, Chagall, or Katherine Pancol.

Lonely T

The shelf immediately below isn’t terribly tall: it holds other, more anecdotal glasses, plastic goblets, green ceramic bottle holders, additional boxes of matches that I’ll pass over for fear of overdoing this inventory that I’ve promised my readers as a coup of sorts (since I do believe that I’m the 1st author to conceive of such a feat). Given the modesty of my needs, there’s plenty of stuff here that’s surplus to requirements: these goods have accumulated according to no coherent policy, yet it’s by no means a contradiction for me to say that I own almost nothing and yet have accumulated plates I never use, as well as 3 terra-cotta dishes still in their original paper wrapping. Clearly I’m just waiting for them to break.

A bachelor’s kitchen is like a virgin territory full of riches its prospectors fail to discover. Sometimes I buy myself a few treats as a reminder of how decidedly average my life usually is. And so this humble set of shelves welcomes the occasional black box of Mariage Frères tea, although it’s nowhere near as utilitarian as the other foods kept here—this small space suits it nicely. In it are 3 relatively unfamiliar, 1 might even say misanthropic, varieties: Alceste black tea, Célimène green tea, and Philinte herbal tea.

The Large Glass

On the top plank of these shelves, visible—quite intentionally—from anywhere in the room, I display my museum of glass. Among the 6 carafes clustered together, the only 1 to bear any words (“dairy milk”) is a milk bottle like the 1s that used to be delivered everywhere (I don’t know if that’s still the case) in Anglo-Saxon lands; I swiped this 1 in Ireland as if it were some Celtic spoil of war, and it always reminds me of the song “No Milk Today,” which my youngest brother used to listen to and which I still have on a 45 that was reissued in the ’80s. This bottle served as a prop for a play, Virginia, at the Théâtre national de Chaillot in 1993. I offered up this accessory on the condition that it be returned after the run, and worried each night that the actor who used it in his performance might break it, but in the end, it came home unharmed, though not without fight. The minute the set was struck, when I went to regain possession of my relic, I ran into a small misunderstanding with some stagehands who insisted that making off with a piece of the production’s property was a breach of some theatrical tradition: that 1 ought never to abscond with an item from a performance for personal use. Oh, the recriminations that resulted from just 1 milk bottle!

The carafe to the right of this bottle is also the fruit of a little shameless plunder, a sport I excelled at for many years, as a child; and while it’s true that such brazen looting carries far less risk than more Machiavellian forms of theft, its rewards are lesser as well. Not to downplay the little whiff of transgressiveness that still lingers around my crime of preference, but this particular feature of the art of plunder—which follows this declension: nothing ventured, nothing gained; little ventured, little gained; and so on—happens to appeal to my miserly tendencies. Anyway, I stole this small carafe from the terrace of the famous Caffè Florian in Venice in 1983, following a bet (won), putting my braggadocio to the test, in which I was challenged to prove that I really had the courage to dine and dash. Right then and there, I got up and left the table at a brisk walk, in the process upping the stakes by hiding beneath my coat this object that I considered not just lovely but perfectly Venetian. This is now the 3rd object I’ve mentioned stealing: I’m not, by nature, a thief, but if the opportunity should arise in specific contexts (mainly commercial), I don’t think twice. After all, theft is property!

Nestled near the milk bottle and the carafe, the 3rd glass treasure is a bottle that once held mead—not that I had any idea of this when I acquired it. Gorgeously sheathed in brown wicker, it brings to mind a woman tied up with rope for some erotic game. Unfortunately, it’s also covered in a layer of dust that’s formed into clumps and made it less desirable, since it’s now that much less touchable.

The 4th piece in my museum is another carafe, with a heavy base, adorned by the artist Claude Viallat with knucklebones, his trademark, inlaid in the translucent glass. I’d like to invite my readers, in considering this vessel, to ponder too the very idea of an artist having a “trademark,” whereby they insist they have every right to wear out a sort of obsessive label or motif ad nauseam for the sake of making their work recognizable. I do want to believe that a crude form can be imprinted as if with an awl upon our belongings ad infinitum, but I certainly wouldn’t want to see a writer wear out a given style in the same way, just for the sake of recognizability, and there’s no denying the mercenary scent I pick up whenever I see some artist pillaging the latest fads for aesthetic ends—this carafe is indisputable proof of this incessant urge toward branding. There are, of course, artists whose work is driven by legitimate obsessions—Morandi and his own carafes, for example, or Toroni and his circles, or Fontana and his slits—but it can be difficult to distinguish these from those other, vulgar thingummies that merely assert the artist’s imprimatur.

The last 2 carafes on this shelf, wholly unlike each other—the 1st being elongated, sort of resembling a pipette, and embellished with a gray plastic cap; the other being squat and wide and evoking a liqueur bottle—make for an odd couple à la Laurel & Hardy. These objects are actors, and since the reverse is also true, I sometimes dream up impossible identification exercises, wherein novice actors would try to embody a fork, or A-list celebrities might play a stewpot.

To the left of the carafes are assorted mass-produced glasses, replicas of Alvar Aalto designs, classical stemmed glasses, Bodum glasses, red glasses shaped like hanaps, and champagne coupes, all of them forming a small glassen symphony. If it were possible, I would invest in even more glass; only my general aversion to owning kitchen items (and clear preference for the conceptual side of things) holds me back.

Mixing Ideas

I’ve fixated on glass so much, partly in anticipation of pouring an actual drink in 1 of them, and likewise, certainly, because I love the idea of saloons. And, indeed, the half wall that shapes my kitchen is a sort of counterless bar—good enough to lean on, though not wide enough to set down a drink: this was by design, however; the last thing I wanted in my own kitchen was an actual bar counter, which would have had the unwanted effect of making this area seem downright convivial.

The connection between writers and mixologists seems fairly clear to me, not only in a personal sense—many members of my family work in restaurants and regularly patronize drinking establishments—but also for the sentimental reasons espoused by Jean Rhys in her short story “Mixing Cocktails.” Tales, concoctions, and ideas in general all mix effortlessly at a bar. Our mouths are the portals to our minds.

Easystrike

All the way to the left of the glass museum lies a double-function receptacle, an ashtray and its matchbox. Set 7 centimeters to the right of the stove, this bowl that holds both matches and their carcasses comes from a selection of Moroccan tableware ordinarily recognizable by its yellow/green pattern, but here covered with soot, all luster lost. Yes, I could wash it, but I don’t, out of spite; I consider its sootiness more just. The decline in the quality of French matches—once produced by SEITA, our state-owned tobacco company, which, subsequent to its privatization and merger, has retroactively proven its worth by the very mediocrity of the products that have come to replace theirs—is here made shamelessly clear by way of the Leader Price discount-store logo on the box (in blue/red/white—what a shitty picture of France it paints!), in addition to a brainless illustration showing a skier schussing down an alpine landscape, in total contradiction of even the concept of fire. To avoid sparking the flame of nostalgia (an altogether too facile, if profitable, prospect), I’ll say that “I’m not nostalgic, but I do have nostalgias,” a declaration Barthes originally made with the sensitive attention he always gave to matters, as he replaced the past with the memories thereof: in this case, this memory is every French person’s, because it’s of SEITA’s Gypsy emblem, the eponymous Gitane, that smoky woman dancing away on a red-and-yellow match head, as though born from the fire being lit. Aside from being a well-designed logo, the image of an inflammable Gypsy aflame was a thing of graphic and symbolic beauty, so much that it takes every ounce of frosty feminism available to see it as rather sexist. Now, however, instead of this beautiful brunette with her fiery charms, we get a sappy eco-friendly image, even if, in this case, it’s been effaced by a tiny blaze that’s destroyed its lower-left end, rendering the bar code illegible; fortunately, the customer service number (call toll-free 0 800 35 00 00) is there to answer any questions you might have.

Chef’s Whites

The last part of this kitchen corner, which closes off the rectangle, consists of a 119 cm × 60 cm work counter set in both the real wall and the half wall, and is made of the same plastic that surrounds the sink—a slice of the same perpendicular whiteness. The ideal whiteness of 1’s kitchen is a convention to which I’ve made my sacrifices, just like everyone else. White walls, white half wall—the same white that has seized control of practically every Western interior, thanks to its absorbent and luminous virtues, and is only extending its dominion. There’s no denying a kitchen’s aesthetic and moral dimensions; we have to keep it all the more clean, make it all the more exalted, than any bathroom.

I’m attracted to propriety, perhaps because the word is so close to “property,” the former being a means of erasing the guilt inherent in the latter, even as it glorifies it. Only in cartoons, where everything is smooth, where immateriality dominates, can you have characters who own nothing—or anyway own things without putting any effort into keeping them—and who are thus wholly abstract. As far as literature goes, we have Balzac to thank for filling the medium with furniture—not to mention money, dirt, titles and deeds of ownership, pension funds, plates, and pork filets with sauce. The bleach of modernity arrived much later, to whitewash the 19th century’s crimes.

Clue

Mrs. White, in the kitchen, with the knife.

A Woman, a Plan, a Locale

The world owes the invention of the kitchen work counter (which, in French, we call un plan de travail), as we now know it, to an American woman, Catharine Beecher, who might be said to have invented the concept of home economics. Both a designer and an educator, C.B. revolutionized the idea of the kitchen thanks to her functionalist principles, which sought to maximize the use of space with these plans, or counters, and so minimize the material servitude of women. As a man devoted to his interior, I think of her every time I prepare a dish on this countertop. And I must note that Catharine Beecher’s initials are the same as Charles Baudelaire’s. Making soup can be learned, but—now I’m thinking of Baudelaire’s little prose poem—what about making clouds?

Culinary Heritage, or a Lack Thereof

My mother doesn’t like to cook, my brother eats out every single day—however did I end up tinkering in the kitchen?

Under the Counter

Beneath the left side of the work counter are 2 shelves (and therefore 3 spaces) meant for storing the rest of my dishes. A great and frustrating mayhem reigns there, which only a rather indulgent soul could consider to be as poetic as, for example, the antique shop in which Raphaël, the hero of Balzac’s La peau de chagrin, takes refuge, and in so doing winds up abandoning his plan to kill himself. Isn’t it pretty to think that such a jumble of things might keep a hopeless man alive merely by liberating and intensifying the appeal of existence? And yet, emptied of all sentimental value and historical importance, everything that this cabinet holds is, in my opinion, mediocre, utilitarian, standardized. Let’s have a good look at the least pleasant part of my domain.

Handmade

I’ve hidden this territory with a little curtain I’m quite proud of, since it’s 1 of the few things here that I made myself: uniting 2 disparate pieces of cloth—1 white cotton, the other linen—reminiscent of the curtain mentioned infra and supra, by means of staples. Guaranteed handmade, as opposed to this book.

I Love Boringness

It’s true that, as I pull this small curtain to the left, my archaeological project has narrowed to an extraordinarily minuscule scope, but I will not shirk my duty, even as I note that exposing my home amounts to leaving myself vulnerable to ingratitude. On the upper shelf is a heap of plates, a bitter-almond-green tureen, a plastic salad spinner, an electric hand mixer as real as the 1 I mentioned back in the bathroom was imaginary, the heavy base of a stand mixer that I’ve only ever used once to make some gazpacho on September 20, 2011, some dish towels, some plates in boxes, some plastic tablecloths for the very infrequent parties I hold, some aluminum foil that various websites now insist can be dangerous to use. If I have to get to the very back of the cabinet (and sometimes I absolutely have to), then I bend down and push aside this heap of stuff with a scavenging claw to find a plastic bag filled with the parts of a disassembled apparatus, a gift so old I can’t even remember who gave it to me, a stainless-steel food mill for making soup. To keep some semblance of order, I’ve secreted the foregoing in a huge deep ocher Basque plate that consequently holds more than its 4 adjectives.

The Plastic Measuring Cup

My plastic measuring cup, which I use relatively frequently, is clouded on the inside with a thin sheen of flour that reveals just how negligent I am in caring for it. But I find it altogether proper to allow my flour dust to maintain this evanescent existence, like the breath of nourishment itself, fogged on some glass—its little trademark—rather than washing it away. And, independent of whatever it might contain, this measuring cup, in its humbleness, has managed to follow me all my life, from childhood on: the 1 I have here isn’t the same cup, of course, but 1 of its innumerable mass-produced duplicates, found in every household. Its plasticness appeals to me; I prefer it to the glass version: there’s something eternal about plastic, even though it’s not the same eternity as stone, concrete, or glass: it’s a trivial eternity, almost inhuman in the way it’s so easily filled.

Disposable and Durable

We thought we’d disposed of all that was disposable, but it accumulates without dispersing, and we wonder what we’ll do with all that endures and amasses.

The Boy of Cooking

This pile of stuff also contains my personal notebook of handwritten recipes, which has a cover portraying 1 blond boy, certainly American, licking his lips in front of a chocolate-covered dessert; this collection is now in its dotage; I haven’t added a single recipe in at least 10 years, whereas back in the days when its existence was a vigorous 1, I would frequently copy into it instructions for dishes that I found both good and easy to make, like pear gratin, blancmange, meatballs, or pollo exótico; this notebook also holds several loose items—Elle recipe cards, or recipes my friends gave to me. In addition, hidden deeper within this abode are 2 actual cookbooks, living in semihibernation, 1 devoted entirely to vegetables (which I’m coming to enjoy more and more), and the other, Cuisine sans souci, by Rose Montigny, a classic that I’ve occasionally found myself consulting despite the fact that its age—it was originally published in the ’50s and this edition is a reprint—diminishes its usefulness somewhat, since in this realm as in so many others the historicity of taste has closed off certain avenues, forbidding 1 from following those recipes that would be inimical to our modern-day stomachs, not to mention infeasible, such as “Veal Marengo” or “Pineapple Glazed Ham.” The 1 truly memorable trick I’ve pulled off with this book is to have reproduced 1 of its passages from memory during my master’s thesis defense as my way of showing the difference between a utilitarian text and a literary text, a rhetorical gambit I’m especially proud of and which may have been what got me highest honors on my diploma.

Down 1 Notch

The shelf below mimics the previous 1. Only the most servile and uninteresting items, all in a row, bearing as little trace of their use as possible: plastic wrap, garbage bags, casserole dish lids—each accessory giving itself over fully to my use, completely devoid of whatever glimmer of narcissism is necessary to make life a bit brighter. As with some men, they also serve who only stand and wait. Yet the dishes draw far more attention than this Lumpenproletariat does during mealtime conversations, whether between 2 people or only 1 (since I do talk to myself while eating).

Mealtime Conversations

The worst mealtime conversations are conversations about mealtimes.

Even Lower!

On the lowest level, which is the floor itself, we find various cleaning products held in 1 wooden wine case (Miguel Torres, Gran Coronas 1987): this contrast between the container and its contents may be a hackneyed setup, but 1 with enduring effectiveness. I remember the work of an artist who used to put cooking ingredients in the wrong containers, such as oil in a wine bottle, or flour in a saltshaker. Or, for greater contrast, eau-de-vie in a detergent bottle. There’s a trickster born every minute.

Cold Chain

The right of the space under the work counter is taken up by the Frigidaire. Faure brand. 85 cm tall, 50 cm wide, 63 cm deep. It’s almost always empty, except for the days when I’m receiving visitors. These appliances are usually unnecessarily powerful: I always keep mine on 2, which is already pretty cold; cranking the dial to 6 would have consequences I shiver to contemplate. Modernity boiled down at some point to these sorts of mass-produced things; then was frozen in them, and then it must have been sublimated. And all this time my freezer has stayed an arctic research station. I never open it except to de-ice it.

Standart

The cold goes nicely with empty whiteness. Indeed, the most agreeable thing about these mass-produced machines is their standard-issue character, which erases all matters of style—just as supermarkets have the advantage over specialty stores of feeling nothing like anyone’s home.

Fungible Goods

Opening the door to this device—and finding there a few victuals whose vitality hasn’t wholly ebbed—I’m struck by how abandoned it all seems. Right now, there’s some sheep’s milk yogurt (which I pronounce “yogour,” in honor of a friend who found this hilarious), 1 wilted bunch of fennel, 1 open package of Parmesan, some Mexican coffee in a Brazilian container, some Tropicana grapefruit juice, and 1 opened jar of preserves. The kitchen in general, and the Frigidaire in particular—which I’ve always called Frigidaire, never “refrigerator,” as if brand loyalty had completely usurped the appliance’s common name—have taught me that human beings are equally as fungible as foodstuffs (which, come to think of it, I already knew).

I remove a dead stalk of celery lying next to the vegetable drawer. And before I slam this chilly coffin shut, I make sure there’s still a bottle of champagne in there, because life is a long soirée during which it takes endless effort to be even a little happy.

Mass Customization

There are Faures other than mine—decked out with postcards and magnets—but mine is unique, its icy beauty marred only by 1 grease stain.

2nd Service

On top of the Faure, in the tight space (10 cm) still free under the countertop, I’ve found a way to slip in 1 red casserole lid, cracked from the grief of being separated from its better half, as well as 1 plastic basket holding an additional set of cutlery—my 2nd service, as it were, and the 2nd mention of those “doubles” my home is generally lacking, as mentioned supra, and which, in their superfluity, inject a little luxury into our otherwise gray days. It’s very nice, indeed, to have this 2nd service available: aside from the general impression of quantity, which makes the prospect of dinner parties far less daunting, it establishes a hierarchy between my stainless-steel utensils, hidden here, and the silver 1s mentioned elsewhere. I eat with my silver service every day, not with these substitutes—consider it 1 of those little aristocratic insurrections that add some salt to bourgeois life. Bucking the vulgar notion that silver cutlery should never get pulled out save for “special occasions,” I’ve inverted their role in order to improve my daily life: what a clever owner of stuff I am!

Solving the Riddle

Actually, there are 3 other utensils also living down under the countertop: 1st, a large crustacean with tiny teeth and red plastic handles: an endangered species, since to my mind canned food reeks so utterly of the ’60s that I avoid it by any means necessary, but 1 that continues to justify its presence here thanks to the fact that I have to open a few containers of artisanal wild game meat that my relatives in Landes send me each year. This reliable, rock-solid can opener is the antithesis of all the can openers that were inflicted on me previously, each of which were so-called “camping” can openers—basically small sharp knives affixed to metal rectangles that took plenty of shoving and yanking to get any traction and which inevitably led to my receiving cuts generally more psychical than physical, but still intolerable considering that this meant turning every meal into a rather risky ordeal. (If these objects were ranked like pop songs, my red can opener would be number 1 with a bullet on the hit parade, while those dangerous devices beloved by scouting organizations across France would be buried at the very bottom.) The 2nd utensil in this nook is the corkscrew that I use every day (I drink): the sort we call a “De Gaulle,” as some kind of national joke, with a spiral screw and winged arms. The 3rd utensil is a pair of kitchen scissors; its points were wrecked in circumstances I no longer remember. (Actually, they’re not so much kitchen scissors as fabric scissors repurposed for the kitchen.)

I’d like to be able to piece together a rebus using these 3 objects (the can opener, the De Gaulle, and the scissors), but doing so already feels like more of a riddle than I can handle just now.

Intake

In the recess to the left of my chimney shaft, cheek by jowl with my swing-top trash can, stands my Miele-brand vacuum cleaner. A huge mountain of plastic grocery bags (→ BEDROOM) has hidden it from all prying eyes because the machine’s plastic body, colored a bright yellow that would be verboten even on a car, easily makes it visible from a mile away. A ruse, on the part of this object, that would be worthy of the great masters of propaganda—brightening up servitude!—if it weren’t for its long gray plastic hose, its shiny tube, or its detachable head taking up valuable space as well … especially that supple hose, with its aspirations toward independence, which I’ve been forced to set snug between the vacuum’s body and the wall.

The vacuum cleaner is the primary weapon in our miniature housecleaning arsenal; its absence would be quickly felt; unless, like Marcel Duchamp, you’ve taken up dust breeding, this mighty engine has to be revved up every so often. What a shame that I can’t, unlike Jeff Koons, put my vacuum cleaner in a glass case.

Exhaust

Vacuuming is far from being the least exhausting household chore, but its advantage, aside from the guaranteed immediate results of its action, is its monofunctional character: it’s 1 of those rare pieces of technology that’s truly easy to use. And then, along with the pleasure of making dust disappear, there are ancillary enjoyments to be had in its use: eliminating larvae, for example (a live flea, even, on 1 occasion); or suctioning bits of food off the floor—beans or grains of rice lost forever in the bag-tomb. Vacuuming is exaltation incarnate—uniting power and movement; its modest triumph of life over entropy is well worth the effort involved: namely, encouraging this hefty robot to move from place to place … not so different from tugging on a dog’s leash to keep it from running amok. (In fact, from time to time, while methodically repositioning its hose, I’ll slam this massive yellow conveyance against the wall, not out of any specific sadism, but as if I were walking my master’s hound with all the bitterness of a valet.)

In my previous life, when I was able to live in a larger apartment, I was talking to a Sri Lankan cleaner who astonished me with his level of education (a doctorate in sociology). Since then, I’ve had to swallow my irritation at the idea of cleaning my home myself; whenever I haul this monster out, I think of Queen’s music video for “The Show Must Go On,” in which Freddie Mercury, done up as a scantily clad woman, pushes a vacuum back and forth. The lesson: take some pleasure in getting down and dirty.

Decorhetorician

Even when admiring my beautiful streamlined yellow vacuum, I refuse to accept the principles of the design world’s sleazy creatives, who insist on giving purely utilitarian items a few sexy curves, to help them “cut loose.” I admit I might be a bit less resentful when vacuuming with a nicely made machine, but I’m not so naïve or cynical as to presume that an object’s silhouette might change the nature of the work it’s meant to do. It’s ridiculous for my vacuum cleaner or my toothbrush to be “beautiful” when I’m bent double from work.

Reversible Bag

Among my pile of shopping bags there’s 1 eco-friendly tote that was meant to do away with all the others, and of which I am ashamed: I’ve flipped it inside out so visitors won’t be able to see where it came from and then accuse me of collaborating with a ridiculous ideology. But it’s very easy to see through the thin, cheap material and make out the logo of this brand that believes in Mother Earth. I’m just as exposed as if I were made of a reversible material myself.

Total Trash

My little 20-liter Mr. Bricolage swing-top trash can—said top popping open whenever my foot presses down—is a bit too small; I should have gotten the 30-liter model. I went for the smaller 1 because I didn’t want it to take up much space, a sensibility I also apply to minor artworks. The bottom of this trash can, a dangerously thin circle of plastic, cracked after just a few days, giving way under the weight of 1 Bordeaux bottle. I was cheated, conned; I shouldn’t have spent my money on this subpar piece of merchandise—and yet it’s hard for me to take the notion of buying a fancy trash can seriously. (Of course, I’m thinking about this wrong: between 4-star trash cans and rubbish trash cans, there has to be a happy medium.)

Its cracking underscored how intrinsically fragile every object in the world is, which naturally hadn’t come to mind when I 1st bought it at the store: I’m not the sort of person likely to inspect every side of a waste receptacle. (Stendhal’s already said that it’s not possible to describe every side of an orange.) Now, however, the lesson of my trash can with its cracked base has become clear, as if some tutelary deity were whispering to me to stop trying to get to the bottom of things …

Color Counter

I try to set as few things as possible on the countertop, so as to avoid a disorder injurious to the atmosphere of my living room and likewise to respect the implicit charter of all modern kitchens—to stay white, discreet, spare. Out of all the real possibilities open to me, therefore, I’ve selected only those items that might de-realize that credo: on a vividly colored plate my friend Pascale Bouhénic brought me from Mexico (depicting 1 beautiful brunette astride 1 horse driven by 1 sombreroed man) is a gilded compote dish—Made in India—in which you’ll find several colorful fruits: confining these fruits in this dish is my own personal version of the historical argument between form and color, wherein a concentration on form, as Poussin’s partisans would insist, allows 1 to tame the intemperance of color, whereas Rubens’s acolytes would of course champion that very intemperance. Apples, bananas, oranges, or harvest grapes cry out for their shapes to be admired, and so, in the end, it’s Matisse who prevails.

The Black Little Toaster

For similar reasons of harmony, my black Philips toaster, which sits a few centimeters away, has been placed up against the white wall. Its plastic success depends on having access to electricity: as such, it has to be set next to the sink, because that’s the only place where there’s an accessible outlet; its cord is short (a real problem) and when not in use coils into a shapeless latticework; moreover, if I pick up the toaster in question—because I do occasionally use it, not as often as I simply observe it—I can hear, trapped inside, all the stale bits of toast that have fallen into its entrails; and so I do my best to clean them out somehow, shaking the toaster all around in my attempt to extract those little crumbs. There’s always a bit left over, however; the stubbornness of this morsel drives me nuts, but now, 40 years later, whenever I face that fascinating sandy sound I remember that distant house in Brittany where my uncle the tinkerer invited me to discover toasters.

Cleaning House

The ideal countertop, after a meal, should become clean and new again, all remnants cleared away. I tidy the counter into a well-groomed landscape, like a child setting out a toy tea set: I make a clean space. A dark-green plastic imitation-glass carafe gleams with Quézac or Evian mineral water and, as in a hotel room, stands always at the ready. Next to it are 2 trivets: 1 of them circular and blue in the Basque style with a cruciform lauburu; the other expandable and adjustable, meaning it can be made the right size for any vessel I use. I pass a dishcloth over the countertop where some walnut kernels left behind by a guest still linger.

The Anthropologist’s Dismay at the Nutcracker

This nutcracker was 1 I picked for its simple form: its ridged handle burrows into its hole and splits the nut wedged against its circular inset. Once the oleaginous seed has been crushed, this instrument of torture’s handles are pried apart, and all that remains is for some fingers to finish the job and remove the shell. I’m taken by its ingenuity, but the problem is that I don’t eat nuts. I couldn’t resist buying this tool, but it defeats all my certainties: is the measure of true wealth in being content with next to nothing, while those who hoard find their voluminous possessions essentially worthless? Well, even though I’m ashamed by this redundant accessory, I hide it rather than casting it off, even contemplating the prospect of taking it apart, which would require the invention of a new tool: a nutcracker-cracker.

A Poor Plate

I carefully and conscientiously wipe clean a dusty plate, its rim lightly ridged: sole surviving castaway from a childhood dish service, bought from a pottery factory in Gien that once made, among other marvels, the tiles for the Paris métro. It struts and frets its hour on display with a color-saturated pattern of flora arrayed around its rim, its lip, and then is heard no more. It is an unused plate, full of renown and history, signifying almost nothing.

Mise en Abyme

In the middle of this decorative abundance that imperils my quest to find the kitchen’s raison d’être, affixed to the wall and floating high above, is a framed engraving from my friends Annette and Jean-Loup Bajac depicting a scantily clad young girl watering the flowers on her balcony and bearing a caption indicating that she is the gardener. It’s an interior scene: it’s easy to make out the details of the young girl’s apartment in the background (1 curtain, 1 clothesline, 1 door, some painted paneling); or, more precisely, it’s an interior-exterior scene, because the girl is leaning out of her window to water her plants just below the sill—and it’s this very action that’s resulted in this delicate detail: her bared breast escaping her blouse. It may not be inherently “dangerous to stick your head out the window,” as the signs on old trains used to warn us, but it is rather exciting, in every home, to cross such borders.

Slow Tea and Fast Coffee

Finally, more or less perpetually on display, as though belonging to this museum’s permanent collection, we come to my afternoon teacup and morning coffee cup: the 1 dark green in a neo-British style, the other a tall cylindrical Bodum glass. As I think on these 2 stimulants, which I take in large quantities, if watered down—Americano for both—I’m not sure which 1 makes more of a contribution to my cozy kitchen. I do know that the teacup’s style is more 19th century than the coffee cup’s. In any case, tea has to be prepared with exceptional patience, while the jittery effects of coffee seem quite well suited to the swiftness of its concoction. The classicism of tea tempers the “quick and dirty” life to which I aspire.

Postprandial

I love to see immaculate, catalog-ready kitchens ruined by parties. I love to see those rooms ravaged by soirées—love to see how spilled ashes, stained floors, piled-up plates, half-filled tumblers, unfinished flutes of champagne, and partly eaten slices of cake combine in the auroral silence that follows music. A splendid massacre soon dispelled by daybreak.

Beneficiaries

As I leave my kitchen, which is to say the space delineated by my half wall, I want to sing the praises of my scarce home appliances 1 last time, with all the warmth of a homeowner freed from mundane responsibilities. Since they’ve all gifted me with more spare time for poetry, I’ve set up trusts for them after my death—for example, should my home be transformed into some sort of terrible writer’s museum. My electric hand mixer is entitled to recognition, as are my corkscrew, my salad spinner, and my bottle opener, all of which have at various moments helped assuage various anxieties. I’ve set down thorough, thoughtful instructions for such a scenario.

Overownership

Whereas for objects, possession equals ownership, real estate requires paperwork. The overowner of this apartment, then, must inscribe each 1 of his possessions in his register. He’s working his fingers to the bone with all these details—but he’s only got himself to blame.

Echo of a Bell

The object that set the rhythm of my childhood meals as a rich kid was the servant’s bell, which I was allowed to ring at the end of each course, to tell our dear Céleste to bring in the next, its use producing a “high-pitched, copious” tinkle, paraphrasing Proust, but a far cry from my doorbell’s muted tone, which now, once again, reaches my ears. This time, I walk calmly toward my door, hoping against hope for a 2nd ring.