Bedroom

(11.60 m2)

 

Theater

As in some stage performances, there are 2 ways to enter my bedroom: either from the office or from the living room (which is the solution we’ll go with). Here a curtain serves as the divider; there, a door. The importance of these entrances is inversely proportional to the consistency of their material. If I enter through the “service” doorway, I feel like a maid; whereas, through the “normal” doorway, I feel like I’m still myself.

Termini

The wall separating the bedroom from the office is probably 1 of those “half-load-bearing” walls mentioned supra, but I never intended to knock it down—not before the remodeling started, and certainly not after the incident that educated me in the notion of “half-load-bearing” walls to begin with—because work and sleep are as foreign to each other as day and night, so it stands to reason that any obstacle lying between the office and the bedroom would hardly be in need of removal. This room is solidly demarcated from those that flow into 1 another—the entryway, the kitchen, the living room, the office—and so I must conclude that the bedroom is, along with the toilet and the bathroom, 1 of the apartment’s termini.

Undrawn Curtain

1 sea-green velvet curtain hampers access to this intimate room. In order to establish conditions conducive to sleep in my lair, and cut it off from the outside, I draw this curtain at night, and even occasionally by day, when its cameral disorder might appall the living room. Compared to the oak door in the apartment’s entryway, the curtain diminishes the sensation of passing through a boundary without quite eliminating it. Such an open system would be embarrassing only in the case of cohabitation; but I break my bread alone. When I’m in the living room, it’s not often that the curtain is drawn, because I enjoy the prospect of seeing into other rooms: it’s how I make myself feel as though I’m living in a bigger, even panoramic, space. But, then, sometimes I draw the curtain so that I can imagine there’s someone in my room, someone who isn’t me (which would only be good news).

Rod Happening

This curtain is attached by sliding rings to a rod that could, if pulled on too hard, fall. Which did happen at a party when some women were hoping to change clothes while other guests were already in the living room, and I had pulled the curtain shut to let them preen and primp in peace … But someone, evidently intrigued by the noises coming from behind the hanging—and thanks as well to the women’s astronomical slowness in getting dressed—tugged heedlessly on the curtain, thereby yanking the rod right out of the wall; in a huge burst of laughter and yelling, the amused guests at my “happening” were treated to the sight of several tight dresses in disarray, while 1 of those dresses’ wearers, having barely escaped the rod falling right on her head, begged for some assistance, which I of course hastened to provide—things couldn’t go on as they were! The damage could only be undone, however, by my getting up on a Tam Tam stool and reattaching the rod as quickly as possible, thereby shielding those scantily clad dames from further upset without making matters worse in the process. My bedroom, strewn with clothes, had become the changing room for these models, just as I had become their provisional dresser.

Spare the Rod …

In its precariousness, this light rod system forces me to moderate my actions, to be sparing, a disagreeable deterrent to my generally voluble impulses. I tend to suffer from the fragility of such setups, built for far more delicate bodies, be it the door handle that I tend to pull far too vigorously to the glasses I come dangerously close to breaking with my clenched fist. My idea of comfort calls for a particularly Nordic brutality, resulting in sturdy furniture, firm fittings, lots of reinforcement; and yet I still have to handle everything with care, since I decided in the end that a dainty setup is simply more elegant. This disconnect between fragility and comfort keeps resulting in the same accidents; if I consider my apartment to be less than sturdy, these rods play a big role in that appraisal: that “happening” was the 3rd time those treacherous objects betrayed me.

The Secret Heraldry of the B____

On the threshold of the bedroom, there remain, nailed to the left post of the doorframe, the 3 hinges that held the door that once hung here. I’ve never seen that door. The preceding owner had already removed it when I moved in. As for the hinges, I could have made them disappear, like a construction foreman gearing up for gut renovations; but I didn’t: they hang there uselessly, unattached, making for a quirky emblem, the secret heraldry of the bedroom.

Constrained Design

7 paces are enough to cross the length of this 6-pace-wide room. Its modest surface area bothers me less than its unattractive proportions. Relative to other household rooms, bedrooms, considering their purpose, can certainly be small, and might even be more attractive on account of being relatively confined—but the crude geometry of this space has made my design decisions far harder. The problem created by the spatial organization of this room is this: it’s a square with only 1 wall, on the right, adjoining the office, completely available (the other 3 bear, respectively, 2 gaping holes—the entrance and the window at the back—and 1 protrusion, namely the fireplace on the left-side wall) for 2 massive yet unavoidable pieces of furniture, the bed and the armoire. I could set the armoire in the space taken by the bed but not the bed in the space taken by the armoire, since the entrance would, in that case, rather than being narrowed, be completely blocked: thus, the entire room must be organized around the bed (which, it’s true, is also its raison d’être). My bed can’t be put anywhere else, so its volume logically goes in the area between the window wall and the fireplace, although it doesn’t completely fill that space; its length, however, goes to half the window’s width, preventing the left pane from being opened too easily. The armoire, in contrast, enjoys a broader range of positions along the wall: it’s only visible when someone actually enters the bedroom fully, and its shallow depth doesn’t take up much of the room, because it’s set within a recess. So I’ve done my best with the double constraint imposed by my furniture and this floor plan.

Square

The bed’s gluttonous presence makes it difficult for me to take a leisurely stroll around my square. Meandering toward the window, I have to stop midstream and step right so I don’t run into my bed, which blockades that distant shore. Other angles are less tricky. 3 out of the 4 corners are accessible—I can only go partway in some cases: it’s easy to make a diagonal crossing from 1 to 3, but not from 2 to 4. At best, I can sketch smaller squares within that of my room by turning inwardly, concentrically, like Josef Albers painting squares within squares. Is this reduction of movement partly why I spend so little time here in the bare center of the room?

Walking Along the Walls

As I enter, I go along the walls, from the left to the right, following the direction in which I write: the wall mirror, the closet door, the fireplace, the bed, a part of the window and its curtain, the electric radiator, the 5th chair, the office door, the garden furniture, the armoire and its double curtain, the Tam Tam stool, the floor lamp.

Mirror Without a Trace

Immediately to the left, on the small part of the wall adjoining the kitchen, stands the mirror, 58 cm wide, hidden in the corner, its full-length 180 cm height approaching mine. It contains me. Firmly affixed to the wall with plastic anchors, it rests on a white wooden bar. I inherited it from the former owner. Most such inheritances evince some element of their pasts, but this mirror has the advantage of retaining 0 trace of its previous owners—including previous Thomas Clercs. (Which is how, when I started this book, my mirror had no mustache.)

I’ll Be Your Mirror

Sometimes I walk aimlessly around my place. I’ll take 100 steps and finally meet myself in front of the mirror, which is where I always end up: I make sure I exist by making faces, grimacing, or else staying perfectly immobile, impassive, waiting for someone to break through from the other side. Then the glass begins to irritate me: I have to make a spectacle of myself in front of it, as at those parties where I get bored and feel the need to shake things up by acting out. But in the end its steadiness steadies me; I wear myself out while it just goes on hanging where it’s always hung.

Mirror Boogie

If a novel is a mirror going along a road, as the aptonymous Saint-Réal had it, then this book is indeed a novel, but a shaky 1. To get an exact reflection, you have to wriggle around in turn.

The Lock of the Law

Forming a corner with the wall is a closet door, in all likelihood a former pantry, which is kept shut with a minilock. Protecting (poorly) a space that holds nothing precious, this tiny lock, which still reeks of the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville where I bought it, would be pretty ridiculous if it didn’t perform its role with such perfect aplomb. Its smallness is touching, as though it were the last man in town still sworn to uphold the law—like a sheriff shielding his prisoner from a lynch mob.

Casuistry of Closets

This 5-shelf, 30-cm-deep closet houses a hopelessly chaotic world lacking any form. Its concealing function is essential, and opening it reveals its flaws, its unsoundness. But I suppose it’s time to concede the futility of that casuistry and open my closet to my readers’ inquisitive gaze.

Tied Up

The door discloses an unforeseen element: its inner panel. From a green silk thread kept taut by 2 thin screws hangs a set of ties. I have a habit of forgetting they’re here. Worried they’d just make me look overdressed, I end up avoiding such accessories wholesale, usually to my subsequent regret, because I’m a fan of neither the petite-bourgeois ideology that insists on men wearing finely knotted ties on all occasions nor of the facile nonconformism that rejects this stricture for its unavoidably conservative connotations. Tie wearing is, for me, an occasional joy at best. There are only 3 I actually like: 2 in imitation wool, 1 black and the other sky blue; the 3rd, dark blue, is still in the dry cleaner’s cellophane. Imprisoned in this transparent protection, it seems all the more beautiful to me. I adore its sous-vide beauty.

The others are, to me, no more than possible ties—such as these 2 patterned silk numbers, dark blue and red, too violently mariachi-printed to be worn, these days, but which I still hold out hope of putting to work again when this style comes back into fashion. As for the rest—the imported ties, which ought to be deported, and then the wholly superfluous 1s, of questionable taste, or anyway a taste that’s no longer my own—I’d love, for the sake of cleanliness and simplicity, to get rid of them, so that only what is Useful remains, and yet I don’t have the strength to do so. I find myself frozen between the respect I feel is owed such objects and the relief that their disappearance would bring me—staring at these unmoving lengths, hanging there, threatening to outlive me and so wind up in the same consignment shop from which they probably came. I stroke them impotently, as a woman might the detumescent member of a man she barely feels any affection for anymore.

Top Shelf

It’s the least accessible 1: to reach it I have to use the 3rd Tam Tam stool, which will appear farther down. There are 4 shoeboxes here, 2 on each side, like headstones or burial mounds, containing the rest of my archives (← ENTRYWAY). Their inventory would provide a complete overview of my social life, but as it isn’t my intention to provide a complete autobiography, as yet, I’m only keeping these memorials for conservatorial purposes. Only being stuck at home, sick—such days being conducive to nostalgia, or, in the worst cases, discouragement, or, in the best cases, curiosity or getting to feel like an old man—would ever justify my looking at them. So these boxes will stay shut, sheltered by the text that contains them. My text isn’t a text of texts.

2 Burglar’s Fingers

1 of these boxes is disfigured by a hole 2 fingers wide, made by the burglar who thought that these shoddy memory boxes might hold some treasure. This crude hole makes me ill at ease: I tried to efface it by transferring my archives into a new box … but I’ve still kept this evidence of the violation of my home as an ever-fresh reminder of the break-in. If he had kept going, scattering the contents of the box on the floor, here is what that lawless bourgeois we’ll call a crook would have found: postcards, invitations, announcements, flyers, small whimsical texts, old ID cards, etc. There’s a vast abyss between the discrete minutiae of that archive and the unity of this work. Exhibiting these documents would be exhausting; burglary, however, I imagine to be exhilarating.

Hidden Works

2 disproportionate articles fill the space between the shoeboxes on the left and those on the right: there’s a work of art given to me by its creator, Pierre La Police, which I can’t unfurl because it’s 15 meters long. Titled Leisure Time, it’s a massive folded-up comic strip, a tour de force only this great cartoonist could have pulled off. I admit I have a strange compulsion to hide this work of art from prying eyes, but then I’ve already said that my love for art is greater than my need to own it, and that the collector’s mind-set is alien to me—a viewpoint that only a sudden change in financial status could alter. Hiding a work of art like this deprives it of its power, 1 way, perhaps, for the writer to exact revenge on the visual artist, whose work asks so little of its audience, in contrast to the book, which asks so much.

A feeling of acquisitiveness is, however, unavoidable for the other object filling this space between shoeboxes …

Cash

Containing ugly yellow coins that leave a coppery odor on my fingers is a sordid plastic sachet from the bank: a dusty heap I hope doesn’t stand as a metaphor for myself, which may be why I’ve consigned its dusty traces to silence at the back of this cabinet. Sticking my hand into the bag, I discover that my petty cash comes to just €4.40.

Ready Money

I don’t own a safe, and since I trust in banks like an idiot, I don’t keep much of a nest egg. Where do I put any extra cash? My wallet usually sits on the dentist’s cabinet, but it can move from room to room. For those who prefer their assets liquid, I don’t recommend doing what a businessman I know did: slipping bills into books that had titles connected to money, like Péguy’s L’argent, or Dos Passos’s The Big Money. 10 years after the switch to the euro, he found some francs hidden in Gide’s If It Die …

Shelf No. 4

Confronted with this shelf, again with heaps of papers and miscellany on each side to give a semblance of order to the documents lying here, I feel a bit ill at its hideousness. To combat this plague, the radical solution would have been to annihilate the contents; the progressive solution would have been to set aside additional storage space; the conservative solution would be called the status quo; the literary solution is called Interior. To the left are piles of old journals belonging to 2 categories—particularly collector’s items and issues in which my own work was published; that “and” isn’t necessarily disjunctive. To the right, leaning against each other, 2 copies of my thesis unhelpfully duplicate the 1s already to be found at the bottom of my bookshelves, all of which I keep in the hopes of its eventual publication, a hope that, as year follows year, becomes increasingly hypothetical, possibly even obsolete in the wake of a work on exactly the same subject, La forme des jours, arriving in the mail 1 day and giving me the unpleasant sensation of having been shunted aside by some Tommy-come-lately—that’ll teach me to keep things instead of making something out of them. Atop these 2 volumes sleep my previous university work, my master’s thesis—“The Dilettante Hero in 19th- and 20th-Century Literature” supervised by Michel Crouzet, the preeminent scholar of Stendhal—and my dissertation, “The Literarity of Jules Renard’s Journal,” which was supervised by Georges Molinié, the reigning scholar of stylistics. For me these projects now evoke the same satisfied dissatisfaction I feel toward all such highly specialized work: I came to understand very quickly that my real specialty would be life.

Photo Shop

The space between these 2 piles is filled by a bag of photographs. The time when I took photos isn’t quite over because it never really began; I indulge in this middlebrow art purely at random. I do still keep mementos thereof, such as this small blue canvas album in which I intended to paste a photo of myself each year on my birthday (April 27), beginning at 14. I lost the perseverance that would have enabled me to bring this project to full fruition, however, in the intervening time—it would have made sense only if entirely complete, and this “album of a life” now contains more gaps than years.

Photo Finish

Opening this rainbow-striped bag (I put my old photos in a stylish bag the better to create a disconnect between container and contents), I discover some prints made by my aging, silvered Olympus camera (← ENTRYWAY). These photos are records of a past in which I no longer even recognize myself—as if the defunct device that captured them also aged them to almost nothing. I’ve never wanted to look at these friends and governesses and parents whose presences coincided with the moment of the flashbulb’s firing ever again; I just can’t shake the fear that the distancing effect these photographs generate would, in turn, contaminate me. The other, more recent photos are the products of Kodak disposable cameras far better suited to my way of taking pictures. Disposability, which frees me from any insistence on quality, suits my vision of technological simplicity. Kodak, alas, is in free fall as of this writing, and the FunSaver with Flash cameras (2 for €15), made in Mexico, are dying 1 flash-spasm at a time …

Archives Are Emotionally Endless

It’s so frustrating that I don’t even feel genuinely uncomfortable as I lay eyes on this evidence of my life. So I won’t force myself to describe these pictures in detail (to you): better to keep these far-too-visual things invisible, considering that I can see in them the principles guiding the assembly of this album, where paragraphs have taken the place of photographs: just as a museum’s storage rooms aren’t accessible to the public, refusing to exhibit the entirety of my collection frees me from the fatal burden of exhaustiveness. In 20 or 30 years, when I look at these photos again, that action will carry a different emotional weight—and that’s why I think I ought to revisit this same project many years down the line, just as galleries promise visitors that all of their many treasures will be rotated out of, then back onto, display in due time.

Phabricated Evidence

I take out my 4 cameras and place them on the card table now set up in the bedroom: the 2 identical disposable Kodak cameras, the Polaroid, the Olympus. Only the last 1 no longer works. So I take a photo of it with 1 of the disposables as well as with the Polaroid; then the Polaroid with a disposable, and the disposable with the Polaroid; then, finally, disposable 1 with disposable 2. In this way I’ve established some solidarity between the generations.

A Sickening Piggy Bank

Adding to the crummy jumble of this dark corner is the hyperrealist intersection of an issue of Pariscope dating from my birthday week (in 2010) and a black plastic piggy bank. Grabbing this piglet the very second I finish my sentence, my own disgusted weariness cries out “Enough!” in the face of my closet’s overstuffed absurdity. This poor piggy bank suddenly seems utterly senseless, and, as its ugliness no longer strikes me as especially touching, I decide to pitch it.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Belongings

If, in the process of enumerating my belongings, this text could also disburden me of them, then I’d be indebted to this creation of mine; such an impetus to clean up and clear away every no-longer-necessary belonging could only be for the best. My dream is of minimalism, but when have I ever followed my dreams? So much waste betokens both the misery of an overabundant society and the difficulty of living an ascetic life: I’m no better than those dunderheads who stuff their rooms with any old junk for fear of that inverse terror known as emptiness—I let the same sniggering horror get the better of me, and so found myself swallowed up by this vast landscape of rubbish, filling me with the desire to escape to some secluded hideaway where I can finally live as I’d like. But enough of talking the talk. If I’m going to walk the walk, I’ll take this gewgaw and throw it out. I’m on the path to freedom now.

Shelf No. 3

It’s a neat and tidy shelf, of practically 0 interest: to the left are the comic books that didn’t make it to the bookshelves, shelved unnaturally (meaning horizontally) along with 2 copies of the 2005 Paris phone book. Being a perfectly outdated object, this who’s who is intrinsically poetic; the fact that it’s becoming an endangered species makes it even more so, and yet, even still, it remains just useful enough that I’ve preserved it here. Oh, how I wish I’d kept my phone books from previous years! Now I can’t even check to see if I really existed back then. Of course, only a true hoarder would hold on to a life’s worth of phone books—an imperfect monument in 80 volumes. And yet, reading this old directory, and sometimes gleaning information from it about people who are now or might as well be ghosts, gives me more joy than finishing 100 novels (and it hardly takes much imagination to see the beginnings of a few new fictions here too…).

Bulky, Clunky DVD Player

10 centimeters off sits my DVD player, because there’s just no way to balance this 24 cm × 23 cm device atop an even smaller TV. To be honest, I don’t really like watching DVDs; to my mind the TV is for TV—that is, for broadcasts. Home theaters undermine the present: the TV is less a piece of furniture than a medium unto itself, and all the derivative products that have sprung up around it have by now completely overwhelmed the original object.

Inventoried Neutral Mask

This authoritative inventory finds its ironic representation in the presence, imposing as soon as the closet door is opened, of a neutral mask. Bought at a joke & prank shop (a specialty of my neighborhood) for the sheer pleasure of the object, its thin molded plastic exudes an enigmatic force, an absolute theatricality. A neutral mask intrigues in its inexpressiveness, itself expressive by sheer subtraction. I don this white mask only on very rare occasions: staged photographs, erotic scenarios, performances, etc. This membrane, which isn’t wholly unlike skin, suggests the idea of a thin film stretched across all of reality, a barrier only betrayed by its few apertures (eyes, nose, mouth). In it I see every self-portrait in 1: a self scrubbed clean yet shrouded. I recently used this mask onstage, appearing in front of an audience with my face covered as I declaimed a poetic response to Valery Larbaud’s poem “I always write with a mask upon my face…” which I’d hoped to invert, because it seems like I’m someone who “always lives with a mask upon my face,” a mask that writing should actually tear away. What greater gesture could there be than to destroy the hypocrisy of living?

The Shelf That Isn’t Mine

The central shelf is 35 cm high, putting its shorter neighbors above and below to shame. Its odor is distinctly feminine: it’s the space I leave for my partner when she comes to spend the night. Various items that don’t belong to me, that I therefore don’t feel I can legitimately describe in these pages, are strewn across this shelf, resulting in a theoretical problem that I hadn’t foreseen: I’ve discovered that not everything I have in my home is necessarily mine. In effect, if I own all the goods that I’ve described so far (with clerical precision), the intrusion of these new elements introduces a beneficial disjunction between simple possession and outright ownership.

From the owner’s point of view, there’s always the option that, although immoral, can’t be wholly rejected: simply seizing as 1’s own any objects that have been left in 1’s domain; a practice I don’t think I’ve often adopted, and even as I wonder where my black cap and my Black+Decker drill have gone, I calculate that the sum total of the foreign goods that have been subsumed into my private domain amounts to: some borrowed, stolen, or unreturned books; 1 earring; 1 secret item entrusted to me by an artist, which I will leave undescribed as I wait to entrust it to another friend. But from the writer’s point of view (and those 2 points of view can’t be concomitant), the presence of these objects threatens the integrity of my inventory.

In the end, the only items in this shelf’s little hodgepodge that could be called “mine” are a container of Uriage lotion and some cotton pads. But if I were to go on describing the other relics therein, I’d feel as if I were betraying secrets that weren’t mine to tell, and since there’s no reason 1 can’t be both a gentleman and a consistent writer, I turn the page on this hoard.

Where the Heart Is

This paltry space often feels like an accusation of emotional neglect. No matter how many arguments I could make to grant her more space here (especially given the closet shelf’s central location, which puts its contents directly in my girlfriend’s sight), I still can’t convince myself to do so. With 2 people in this apartment, I’d go mad; alone, I yearn.

Shelf No. 5

Here we’re entering the most explicitly clothes-related shelf, where 2 former shoeboxes hold underwear on the left and socks on the right, with the empty space in between filled by 1 chrome shoehorn.

Interior Man

My briefs are of many brands, so many that it’s clear there’s absolutely no underlying logic here. I hew to a classic American model, size S, which I like for the simplicity of its line and its wide array of colors; I even have 1 set aside, still in its original packaging. The idea of “clothes set aside” reassures me, just as food set aside in a pantry might, even though I rarely succeed on the latter front. Before I found perfection in an American brand, my preferred pair was a silvery number, its brand Hom, its profile nearly rectangular—an interesting compromise between the boxers and classic briefs that frames its contents in an aura of scintillating autoeroticism. And there are also other specimens of my past life here, such as the burgundy Lycra Jils that I keep for the days I’m playing contact sports. The pleasure of finding 1’s brand is the pleasure of a mature man: it keeps me from obsessing over this minuscule detail, and allows me to feel like “myself” (as some silly ad still freighted with some philosophical weight might have put it).

A Theory of Socks

As for my socks, the athletic/dress distinction prevails. My 3 white pairs won’t go with anything except my athletic shoes, and what’s more pathetic than men who wear dress shoes with tennis socks? The hell they inhabit extends far beyond the visible part of their lower limbs. (The insane Luchino Visconti insisted, after all, that even the unseen underwear in his films be historically accurate.) And yet there’d be no use, in this case, separating these 2 kinds of socks, so they all swim together in this box like fish of different schools in a single bowl, prized as much for their forms as for their colors. While the white streaks attest to this intermingling, the vast majority here are monochromatic black or navy blue dress socks, which I prefer to light or bright colors (except for an emerald pair that gets worn only in summer). I know that these socks made in China though designed in Japan are of average quality; but, far from being a professional shortcoming, cheap mediocrity in the realm of clothing—as the industry figured out long ago—is in fact ideal, since forced obsolescence is the byword of fashion. (Besides, who’d want to wear the same socks their entire life?)

Happy Medium

Considering these average-quality socks, I wonder if the secret isn’t, as in so many other arenas, just getting a passing grade. The higher my standards, the greater my potential frustration, and as I’ve set my sights on Literature, I already have more than enough disappointments in store.

Holes

Stroking these briefs, I notice that practically every 1 is coming apart at the seams; sticking my hand into my socks, I find too many have holes in their toes.

Freud Doll

Between the briefs and socks, in clear plastic clamshell packaging, we may admire my little figurine of Sigmund Freud. I adore Freud (and deplore all those attacks this liberator of man has been subjected to), and exiling him to my underwear shelf, far from being an insult, is my way of honoring him, by underscoring the attention he focused on the underbelly of practically everything. Every so often, I take out this doll and put it on display. Like a child, I love toying with the placement of things; it’s a way of giving my imagination free rein. Taking Sigmund Freud out of the closet means shining a light on the man who showed us that we’re all closeted within ourselves. I recently propped Freud in front of my vodka, in a nod to his theories’ intoxicating force—but I suspect he shines brighter in the closet.

Disc Jockey Socks

I must now bemoan the presence of certain foreign elements hidden behind my box of socks: a set of LPs I don’t care for anymore. That there is no possible organizational justification to this juxtaposition of Jockey socks and vinyl wounds both the heart and the eye; worse, these discs are reprobates—I can’t even remember what’s back here until I look more closely … which I’ll do now. So I see, behind the bluish cover of Serge Gainsbourg’s La chanson de Prévert (double album), a dozen other classics I’d completely forgotten about. I’ll just leave this brief selection here since most of my LPs are, as we know, set next to the stereo in the office.

Culture Muffler

The relegation of these albums to the closet follows an internal logic, clearly separating the modern universe from the classical, betraying my musical preference for the former. Barely represented by a dozen works that I never listen to, a halfhearted attempt to experience “great music” that only earned me the snickers of my friend the French composer Jean-Christophe Marti (1964–) back when we were young and considered ourselves the devotees of so many different musical genres, my collection of classical hits is rather disappointing. My misbegotten musical taste, the fact that these classic albums are all hidden by Gainsbourg, who considered his relationship to great art a central problem, reveals my true relationship to culture, which lurches between liberal, postmodern integration of all genres and an inverse preference for the value judgments and hierarchical distinctions of cultivated taste. The great masters of world literature are inarguable, as are Bach or Berlioz, who stand next to horrible old-fashioned Dave and wonderful old Damia at my place. My own problem is that my love for Serge Gainsbourg doesn’t have any literary equivalent; I’m only a legitimist in my own realm.

Unacceptable Object

Squatting in the center of this shelf, an unacceptable object molders in an Opticiens du Jura bag—a pair of glasses. Just 2 years ago I started having trouble with my vision, so I had to accept that the eagle eyes I’d once taken pride in were turning human. Even as I spend an increasing amount of time reading and writing, my sight has blurred ever so slightly at its edges, almost as if my eyes hadn’t quite focused. Faced with this evidence of my ocular aging, I chose the Opticiens du Jura to bear witness to my fledgling farsightedness, not only so as to boycott corporate retailers with 1 of those political microgestures that feel far more effective than merely declaring my principles, but also because the Jura is the original home of the Clerc family: I love connecting the most important of my senses, sight, to my name as well as to my favorite number, 39, which is coincidentally both the département number of the Jura and the age at which I published my 1st novel.

I’ve never put on these glasses. The minute I ordered them, my eye troubles went away.

Sun/Sight

To demonstrate my victory over mere biology, I set my sunglasses atop the corrective glasses in the bag. And, as a further affront, I also keep 2 other pairs, which allow me to look at the world through maple-syrup-colored lenses.

Churinga

Last but not least is a pebble I’ve transferred from its native habitat on a Breton beach to here, without any real reason. An illustrious poet once wrote about pebbles, and it’s perhaps in homage that I’ve claimed ownership of what a fusty anthropologist might have called a churinga, that totemic object Central Australian indigenous tribes kept to protect their lands.

Bedrock

Traditionally the weakest of strategic positions, the lowermost space, between the bottom shelf and the floorboards, is where all the clutter is stuffed. Some hurricane’s been through here (whether a storm system or simply a human being), since everything’s at 6s and 7s. In this mishmash are all my shoe-related accoutrements kept self-referentially in a shoebox: 2 shoe waxes (cordovan and oxblood) and 2 tattered graphic tees repurposed for buffing leather, thereby allowing these tatters to enjoy a few beautiful twilight years. This toolkit teeters atop a soft mountain of motley objects: 1 bag full of bags, 1 horridly prune-colored computer bag of uncertain material; 1 small electric heater I could set up in unheated rooms, like my bathroom, or as an extra heating element anywhere else; 1 Wilson tennis racquet I haven’t been able to throw away even though I haven’t played that sport in eons; 1 pocket-size umbrella that’s merely an understudy for my other umbrellas; the metallic base for the shattered entryway light; 1 backpack, justifiable only in the countryside, no matter how often my countrymen use them in the city; 1 box of plastic badminton shuttlecocks and 1 beachside racquet; 1 unopened IKEA package holding 1 folded blue canvas bag labeled SKUBB; finally, the crown jewel of this neighborhood museum, 1 ocelot-fur bed throw, still in its bag, along with a few of the fur’s trimmings.

Wonderfur

The ocelot fur deserves a bit more attention; it was cut from my grandmother Alice Bovar’s fur coat, and my mother had the idea to turn it into a bed throw by stitching some brown cloth to its underside. In addition to being beautiful—with its black spots and bright colors, and all the incomparable softness of real fur—it’s saved me from many a chill when I’ve pulled it from its niche and used it as an additional, invaluable source of warmth. I can’t presume it has any monetary value—it ought to command 100s of euros, but is actually unsellable, as a furrier on the rue d’Hauteville confirmed when I brought it in for a cleaning—whereas its sentimental value has long been established by my mother and my mother’s mother.

The motherly protection of this warm fur warms my heart. And it’s a token of my mother that keeps me cozy when, in winter’s chill, I unfold this beast’s hide. 1 other image comes to mind as I touch this fur, an old memory, hardly maternal, more conventionally erotic, of my trysts on this animal with a no less animalistic lover.

Subset

I own 2 more of my maternal grandmother’s things in addition to this ocelot fur: the chrome rack in the bathroom, and the Napoleon statuette. These 3 elements that coexisted at 1 particular time and space, now distant—the apartment she once had at Porte Dorée—have become a subset of that place, like an entire apartment depicted in a few brushstrokes. Much like the objects in my apartment that move from room to room, constantly changing their placement and configuration (like my watch, wallet, or cell phone), so will the goods now belonging to me eventually be scattered throughout various other homes, my “posterity” creating in turn other subsets, subsumed within other sets of objects from homes that never were mine. Objects may give our abodes their deceptive unity, but they were born elsewhere, they live through eons, and they will endure through the collapse of many other empires.

Coming Out of Hiding

As I shut the door of this closet where my belongings have overcome my attempts to master them, I feel relieved to restore it to its hiding function, a necessity in every home. Lifting the curtain to peek at the wings of my stage set would destroy the (illusory) museum that these spaces otherwise suggest; locking the door with its small latch, I restore this room to its false premise of orderliness.

And then I hear, very weakly, vaguely, from the depths, the voice of Raymond Federman! That young Jewish man who owed his survival in the winter of 1942 to the closet where he was hidden, and who, far from rebuking me for reporting the facts, whispers that I’m right to continue my quest. That my vain self-contemplation shall be forgiven. That life is a political invention. That we all have to empty our closets.

Black White Fireplace

Feeling energized, I make my way to the white-stone fireplace, which protrudes 60 centimeters into the room. I had to have it swept out each of the 1st few winters I lived here (for the sum of €30 each time) to get it to work; after that, I stopped bothering with fires; I should really have it swept again (for the sum of €50) but I no longer feel the same urge to pay my respects to such shrines. Parisians! I know that blazing hearths hold just the virtues I revere, but I refuse to confer them upon my own bedroom. This renunciation is more than just an evolution of my theories of interior life. It’s a black void.

Lost Fire

If I ever did buy, carry up, and set some wood at the base of this fireplace, like a ritual sacrifice, I’d only find myself trying to outlast an invasion of cumbersome logs caked with dust and soot. And even though I quite like the idea of destruction by fire—it well suits my dream of negating objects entirely, that dream I return to each day as I lug a full bin of papers down to the courtyard—the need to 1st go out and buy kindling stops me dead: far better, I think, like Bernard Palissy, to burn 1’s own furniture. The idea of using my fireplace is so much nicer than actually doing so. And as I behold its abstracted power, I make out the 1st signs that my love for my household is already on the wane.

Fireplace of Consolation

Which doesn’t stop me from contemplating it. Its simple form, its trapezoidal descent toward the darkness of its maw, impress me more when it’s empty than when it’s lit. The contrast between the white of its façade and the black of its depths is cold in its perfection. Instead of ashes, dust proliferates. And, actually, its mantel (112 cm × 31 cm) has a quite practical use.

Postbourgeois Mirror

As in those bourgeois apartments (my own is a pale imitation), I’ve very conventionally set a mirror measuring 75 cm × 67 cm on this mantel. Its gilded frame, with neo-Corinthian moldings, masks its relative decrepitude: the floral patterns are almost all broken. This noble, ailing mirror reflects 2 aspects of its owner: stability of station, but also diminishment thereof.

The Poetry of Property

I live at the boundary of art and the bourgeoisie, and while I’m not quite sure what this means, I’m writing it down because it came to me, dictated by this fireplace mirror. I’m writing a poetics of property. I am possessed by a lust for possessions; the property code pulsates in every nook and cranny of my average little life.

Mantel Wings

2 sides, 1 vase, and 1 lamp. Use a bit of poetic arithmetic and we’ve got 3 possible lighting configurations.

April Vase

To the left, a sublime vase, called an April vase, a gift from my friends for my 30th year on this earth, has 25 glass tubes bound by 1 metallic (but malleable) structure allowing for a multiform arrangement. I usually choose that of a bouquet, closed like a fist. I only rarely put flowers in this vase, because I live alone and only have flowers in the house if other people bring me a few. And unlike the House of Lords I might consider those eternal plants 1 finds in waiting rooms, the flowers here make up a House of Commons: any of them can be voted in and just as easily voted out. Flowers are ephemeral. They’re impatient; in fact, these 1s here are impatiens.

Perfume Names

Near the vase is a bottle of the cologne I use, its vial embodying the austere and sensual ambiance that a room should exude. Unfortunately there’s no fragrance called ad vitam aeternam, so the 1 I’m currently using is called Flowerbomb, by Viktor & Rolf, which comes in a large oval bottle reminiscent of a grenade, topped by a rose-gold cap whose color complements that of the eau de parfum it holds. But as I edit these lines, it’s Sables, by Annick Goutal, on my mantel; and then, as I proofread them, Musc Ravageur, by Frédéric Malle. The brands have changed over the course of writing this book. Their scents layer a whiff of infidelity over everything they touch, so I uncork the unadorned vial, bring it to my nose, and think of the sweet nothings women have whispered to me; then I recork it, happy that it’s half full, worried that it’s half empty.

Bedside

The right wing of the mantel, above the head of the bed, holds a small white-and-green plastic Culbuto lamp shaped like a teardrop, its base keeping the structure (socket + bulb) level. The 25-watt bulb burns out slightly too often, and the upper half has a crack from a fall; these faults notwithstanding, it insists on being my bedside lamp. I don’t keep books on my nightstand both because I’m a nonconformist and because I don’t have a nightstand, so the fireplace mantel serves in its stead. These books, about 40 of them in 5 piles, are what I’m currently reading. There are those at the top that leave, and those that, at the bottom, stay.

Adverse Sculpture

Invading nearly the entire mantel, these columns of books, some 20 centimeters high, blockade the mirror’s lower 3rd, making it hard to see myself. This territorial conflict is fought without mercy: the mirror’s false purity on 1 side, literature’s honest impurity on the other, each refusing to blink 1st. I’ve baptized this group an adverse sculpture. The equilibrium between the books and the glass is fragile; the higher the columns reach, the closer the mirror comes to disappearing. I have to make sure that this doesn’t happen.

Territorial Rivalries

This 2ndary conflict distracts 1 from the deep-seated rivalry between the bed and the armoire for control of the room.

A Bed Secreting Secrets

Aside from Murphy beds in cramped spaces, trailers, or servants’ quarters, there’s just no hiding beds. Mine takes up a large part of the room but still follows the Chinese art of feng shui. As 1’s day is largely determined by the previous night, a better night’s sleep calls for the presence, on at least 1 side of the bed, of a lateral wall, following 1’s instinct for self-protection. Detached beds remind me of boats adrift at sea. Here, however, 2 sides are protected, 1 by the back wall, the other by the fireplace, so I only have 1 way out. Other users might prefer 2 paths of egress, but that’s only necessary when living as a couple and trying to get out of bed without climbing over each other’s bodies. I’m a bachelor, but I have a double bed, as I’m by no means a bachelor emotionally; the true bachelor would have a single bed, which would shape his life accordingly. Single-user beds lead to monasticism.

Bed of Fêtes

I bought this standard-size 195 cm × 145 cm bed during my decennial move, as if a new space naturally called for a new bed, and consequently a new life. For purely economic reasons, I made this acquisition at a store on the Place des Fêtes that was offering a package deal on box springs and mattresses. Once it was set up, I was surprised to have made this indisputably “decisive” purchase—especially for a man who devotes 10 hours each day to sleep—in a part of Paris I rarely visit because of its paralyzing ugliness; but now I see that buying a bed near the Place des Fêtes was an homage to this fundamental object, where the 2 main fêtes of life take place: love and sleep.

Château de Seix

This bed is raised 20 centimeters above the floor—a choice I’m not sure I would make again, in my future life. A bed on legs, aside from the minor inconvenience of thereby offering dust yet another place to breed, implies a fear of floors quite detrimental to sleep. It does, admittedly, stave off discomfort by reducing the spatiotemporal interval between lying down and sleeping, but for me falling onto my bed evokes more erotic associations than a platform bed might. Does eroticism need to be elevated? On the contrary, love on the floor seems more appropriate, more grounded, more fervent than what is proposed by the 4-legged bourgeois bed—namely, health, prosperity, honesty, fecundity. (I have to cross out what is the ugliest word in both English and French.)

French Psycho

I’ve positioned my bed the way they do in love hotels, in sight of the mirror described supra; lying supine, I can’t see it, but I can change my posture and orgasm to this double feature of sex both realized and reflected. If modesty should narrow my focus to the act itself, it’s easy for me to open the cabinet door and hide the mirror. But I do so adore the bedside mirror’s eroticism, which lovers, like Patrick Bateman, know can transform the sexual act into an artistic experience! (I’ll let him keep all his other sordid vices for himself, though.) The duplication of the act isn’t the act itself; rather, it becomes an image 2ndary to this coital scene, no longer just us but a savage version of ourselves.

Double Chamber

The bedroom is the most intimate and secluded room, the 1 never explored in strangers’ homes or even in the homes of close friends protective of their lairs, the chamber that, as Baudelaire described it, is double; we fill it with our dreams and it is defined by our reality. A friend in my youth, upon seeing the bedroom I had then, once teased me as he entered: “Is this where you make love to your women?” I couldn’t tell whether the sting of his sarcasm lay in the word women, the word your, or the word this.

Love in the Afternoon

From the street, the closing of a window’s shutters can look mechanical, and yet seeing someone performing this banal gesture, especially in the afternoon, inevitably conjures up an aura of mystery verging on the conjugal. I say goodbye to the teeming world, but I say it out loud, delighting in creating nighttime in daytime. This hammed-up farewell to the world, punctuated with the sharp slap of the wood, is worlds apart from the slow descent of an electrical shutter.

Patchcolor Quilt

My bed is covered with a bizarrely proportioned, not-terribly-thick quilt. 3 slipcovers each play their role with regard to this item, 1 being cotton for summers, another nylon for winters, the 3rd for in between. The 1st, colored yellow/green, has faded (its lemon yellow has become meringue yellow; its green has gone from Granny Smith apple skin to Granny Smith apple flesh); the 2nd is charcoal gray. The middle seasons get a toile floral-print slipcover. Repeating its red & white & red pattern of twisted leaves connected by stems to innumerable branches, this design resembles nothing so much as a dream of wallpaper snaking across the wall. And when I sleep, do these embosoming blossoms bloom in my dreams, unfurling oneiric images? In her novella The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman describes the mental collapse of a mind overwhelmed by just such an exuberant motif. Was this slipcover decorated to provoke dreams? Is this print on my bed creeping over my mind?

Orientalism

The quilt’s arborescence having caught my eye, I am drawn toward the Oriental fabric prints covering the card table I occasionally sit at. I unfold a large cotton cloth bought in Dubai, and I admire its simple, ornamental, Islamic bareness. The interlaced red and green leaves on a white background repeat into infinity. The perfect setting for a nightmare, Dubai left an impression both soft and prickly—not unlike this piece of cotton and its multiplying rhizomes.

Well Covered

In winter, 3 layers aren’t too much in a bedroom barely protected by 1 thin curtain. Alongside 2 old cottage-style covers, which I’ve had since childhood, is 1 large pale-blue wool rectangle, bought used and folded over for double the thickness. In extreme cold, I add the ocelot as well: its hide’s soft warmth and its stripes complete the bed’s look, which swings between that of a louche porno set (if I may risk this pleonasm) and the claustrophobic atmosphere of a decadence-era Oriental interior (if I dare set down such grandiloquence).

Inglenook

To reinforce the bedroom’s role and counteract its gloom, I’ve decorated the walls of my inglenook with 2 wall coverings, 1 in white cotton, the other in linen, as a sister to the entryway-hallway curtain. Let us not speak; let us hold our breath and look. This sort of alcove, accentuated with the help of a few thumbtacks, delights me as an idiosyncratic creation. Surrounding the bed with a double awning hems in its space a little more; sometimes women visiting the space ask me why I’ve decked the walls with these 2 cloths. They may not form a canopy, but they do suggest precisely such an enclosure. Framing my nights, they subdue these walls’ cold whiteness with a sense of seclusion. But a faux seclusion, created by mere surfaces, in the bedroom’s inglenook.

Double Bed

As the bed defines the bedroom, 2 main activities/passivities define the bed, and commingle as sleep and love. The bed is a contradictory site. Its chief inconvenience for me is in failing to separate these warring functions, which contaminate each other, because desire is oriented toward others and sleep toward 1’s self. If I had a bigger apartment (that same old song), I’d love to have 1 room just for sleeping and 1 for making love … and yet, even that separate bedroom for sleeping, which every fusionist will instinctively decry, would still be tinged in my mind with a muted eroticism. I can’t think of all that many people who actually have a 2nd bedroom, aside from a few characters in American comedies, and other disciples of Sacha Guitry. And while it’s true that a bed can lose whatever intrinsic eroticism it once held through the sleep that must eventually follow sex, or through the various other situations to which it plays host, whether dramatic (sickness or death) or sublimative (reading), the fact is that beds will always be the primary site for those 2 primal functions: 2 uses for 1 single space … which is 1 too many for me.

As for sex, beds are still the best place for such congress, save perhaps in the eyes of aficionados of those picturesque settings that are to lovemaking what curiosa are to high literature—an infrequent bit of invigorating spice. I’ve only rarely used my other rooms for erotic purposes; I’d say the bedroom is where we make our best decisions.

Pillowcase

As I make the bed, I pull the pillowcase off my pillow and notice that the pillow itself is pretty stained. The physical evidence of my body. So I cover it again with this new, deceptive pillowcase in soft colors.

Roof, Roof, My Roof …

Slipping at night between my sheets, looking out through my bedroom window, the fear of being made to sleep outside—not least because Parisian bedrooms usually look onto courtyards, not the street—makes itself keenly felt. No more than 1 simple wall separates me from the city; but socially, of course, the outdoors might as well be a distant planet. Comfortably curled up in my bed, I know that I’ve landed somehow on the right side of the world, in contrast to that hobo setting up his cardboard boxes under the revolting arcades of the rue Gustave-Goublier. As the son of a fallen man, I contracted long ago the terror of not having a roof over my head—“Toi, toi, mon toit,” the beautiful Elli Medeiros once sang to her lover in a popular French song (“You, you, my roof”)—but I always heard the word toit, roof, rather than toi, you. Is it a stretch to think that I subconsciously preferred the certainty of a shelter that I actually had a chance of claiming for my own rather than the uncertainty of love?

Corsican Proverb Contested by a Homebody

“Better a house full of people than of things.” Not necessarily.

Lying Down

Lying down to read, 1 pillow supporting my back + another holding up my head, I’m almost relaxed. I cherish this position, which makes the living into the “pre-dead,” enchanted by the human stasis conducive to dreams, and especially daydreams (I prefer day to night). Various men and women of letters, Beckett 1st and foremost, have assembled and taken up 2ndary residences in their beds—a 2nd residence within the primary 1 (as Woolf put it in A Room of 1’s Own) of their bedroom. I don’t mind setting up a little fort of pillows and blankets and rumpled duvets in a hotel bed, since I can just abandon it afterward, but at home I can’t take much joy in sleeping in such a messy structure—why, I wouldn’t even be able to find my pen.

Suddenly my covers and ocelot pelt are weighing too heavily on me—I had to compensate for my quilt’s extreme lightness, but now I feel imprisoned in my bed, from which it takes such a great effort to extricate myself that I’m worn out.

The Door of Perception

From my position lying in bed, the white door leading to the office, almost always shut, is 2 meters straight ahead. This oak door, with its 2 molded panels, its ceramic lintel and handle, appears 1,000s of times in 1,000s of Parisian apartments. For all its universality, this 1 has its specific imperfections, such as this thin vertical line splitting it down its middle. Like all doors, it might be seen as mysterious, standing between 1’s self and the unknown; but as I know where this 1 opens to, it’s lost any poetry it might have held. I stare at it steadily, and as if I were on mescaline I notice the delicate play of light filtered through the bedroom window, and the sunlight’s streaks like flickering filmstrips or flitting butterflies. The series of continuous, repeated, hypnotic movements, changing and starting afresh, starting afresh and changing, continues into the night when the glare of car headlights comes to etch its own luminous symphony; and these saccadic jumps erase the space around me, so I’m neither inside nor outside, but between worlds.

The Heir’s Bedroom

I won’t inherit anything from my father, but he bestowed upon me his extraordinary capacity for sleep; from my mother, I just got anxiety.

Insomnia

Night is cut short, I go to the bathroom, crossing the living room’s shadows. My place is sunken in a darkness I wish were total but isn’t. The office’s shutters don’t work, and the Freebox’s small luminous features make me furious as they stand sentry out there, partially outlining the volumes on my shelves. It’s 4:39, and I should take my apartment’s nighttime pulse while I’ve got the chance. My puffy eyes light on the office window. The street is as deserted as a film studio without any actors. Then I slowly make my way back to my bedroom, taking care not to bump into any furniture; a blind person would know his place better than I do.

Destroying a Braun

Time stands still by my bed. Once, for several months, there was a Braun alarm clock here, a black 6 cm × 6 cm square allying beauty in miniature with unticking silence, bought at the MoMA in New York in 2009. Due to some inexplicable technical doom, this device has never worked too well (which is even more maddening than an object that doesn’t work at all—arbitrary fickleness being completely unacceptable when it comes to alarm clocks). I’m even more disappointed here, because I was so trusting of both Germany and modern art, and because having a single-function alarm clock at my disposal had allowed me to avoid making use of my cell phone. After all, if the CEO of Braun is selling his alarm clocks at a museum, he must believe that he’s making art—and so they should absolutely work. Whenever I opened a design book about the purity of form, my Braun taunted me, its hands continuing to turn, telling me it’s 4:20 when it’s 9:45.

So, 1 festive night, I decided to stomp on it, and after I set it on my floorboards, this was easily done.

Joy in Breaking, Pleasure in Destroying

Sometimes, being a martyr to technology, I imagine myself as an annihilator of objects. My resentment finally liberated, I envision the methodical destruction of every machine that’s ever caused me indignity and frustration.

Usually, of course, we only manage to break the things we actually like and use—but when that happens, I recommend an immediate counteroffensive, to ruthlessly destroy something that had simply been tolerated before, thus breaking the curse of breakage. Losing a beautiful glass or a favorite piece of clothing can always be offset by wrecking some gadget, eliminating a useless thingamajig (although that means keeping several substandard products on hand for sacrificial purposes).

Nokia Night

Because my Braun is waiting for repairs that will never come, each day I have to revive the “alarm” function on the menu of my black & Orange Nokia, and every morning submit to its harsh little tone with the message “C’est l’heure!” waking 1,000,000 other tertiary-sector agents to their respective destinies. I know there’s some chance that the cell phone’s proximity to my head every night could prove detrimental to my health, but I still haven’t found any substitute for my Braun.

Life’s Windows

Leaving my bed where I’ve lingered too long, I’m immediately drawn to the bright hole it’s pushed up against, that hole we call a window. The rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin is wide enough that I don’t pay much attention to what I might see in the building opposite, nor do I worry about what those neighbors might glimpse here in my bedroom. Honestly, being seen by others doesn’t bother me: consistent with my autobiographical conception of literature, I’m on display anyway, and without any need for reciprocity. I applaud the immense bay windows of modernist homes, the numerous windows of Haussmann-style apartments, the general transparency of glass; what I dread are bunkers, with their little, horizontal, paranoiac arrow slits. The ever-probing urban theorist Mike Davis wouldn’t be happy here; he wouldn’t have any seedy underbelly to delve into.

Legal Nudity

Naked at the window, I run into a legal problem. Could some prudish neighbor sic the law on me for indecent assault? Just wait: it’ll happen.

Jealousy Redux

The bedroom window replicates the office’s, so it seems a waste of time to describe it again: it has the same number of panes (8); is likewise split in 2 sections; bears the same smudges on its panes, which, as I write this, still haven’t been cleaned; is finished in the same white laminate that was such perfect fodder for its detractors when the 1st double glazings broke up the harmony of Paris’s façades.

I claimed that I didn’t want to redescribe this window, but that hasn’t stopped me from doing so; repeating what’s already been said has never seemed pointless to me—as in Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, where the same scenes play out again and again with only minor variations, and wherein 2 copies of the same sculpture are found in 2 distinct rooms; I find this quite beautiful, in fact. What a shame, then, that my own apartment falls so short of such conceptual requirements.

Spot the Difference

2 details help us differentiate between these 2 windows. 1 concerns the view: it’s just not the same from my bedroom as from my office, which is a bit further to the south. The other difference relates to the daily opening/closing of the shutters in my bedroom, which sometimes knocks loose the protective slat at the bottom of the window. When it falls, this long strip of polyvinyl chloride uncovers precisely the decrepit strip of wall that it was installed to hide. This dilapidation is a harbinger of further, worse, decay: still, I crouch down and press the strip back against the wall, telling myself that it’ll stay, this time. Thus, as in that old game of spot-the-difference (there were always 7), where 2 nearly identical drawings were submitted to our scrutiny, I restore my 2 windows to parity.

Palimpsest for the Future

But before I set the strip in place again, I slip in a piece of paper containing a poem—a secret capital improvement for my apartment. Its future owner won’t know it, but he’ll be living right next to an autobiographical treasure … which I hereby, and gladly, bestow upon him.

A View with a Room

I stand up and, looking at the faubourg Saint-Martin, I think: how wonderful it is to have a forest of windows! Because the sheer pleasure of a vast fenestral range—as seen on those beautiful buildings with long balconies each with 8 or 9 exits—is such a contrast to the unexciting mediocrity of smaller edifices like my own. Odd how property becomes an extension of both dreams and revolutions. I’ll admit that my apartment isn’t historical: I didn’t start a revolt in my living room, or even a literary movement—Mata Hari didn’t sneak into my bedroom nor did any Lee Harvey Oswald take aim from my window at any John F. Kennedy. But, even so, this small lodging—practically a concierge’s residence—has been filled with a whole life.

Residence

I would have loved for my bedroom to be a beautiful residence conceived by some anguished decorator—tout comme la Princesse de Castiglione dans ses appartements, ou Frédéric Chopin dans son logis luxueux au Place Vendôme, je me sens comme 1 réfugié.

Open/Closed

If I open the window, I become public; if I shut it, I make myself private. When I pull in the heavy white wood shutters at night, I’m closing off more than just my room: it’s the day itself, and an entire world, that I’m happily silencing and darkening. They’re unimportant in the office, those shutters, but indispensable here. Closing them requires taking several firm actions: opening the window, leaning forward, sticking a finger through an iron ring, grabbing 1 of the left shutter’s slats, pulling both sides toward me, bracing my elbows against the frame, then fastening everything firmly. This inward movement amounts to a sort of mechanical ballet centered on my pelvic twists. This operation is performed at different times over the course of seasons: it happens very late in the summer, while in the winter I must protect myself against nightfall.

Double Glazing

The 1st night I slept here, I didn’t sleep at all. I knew that I’d sleep badly in a new place; I also knew that the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin, a conduit through the heart of Paris, was packed in the daytime, but I never imagined that it could be even louder at night, when there’s no traffic, and so cars can just speed right through. Doubly overwhelmed by the fear that I’d cheated myself and could never stand to live here, I tapped at the window glass, which hadn’t been changed since the war. The 1st night after I installed double glazing was my true 1st night.

Technical Point

Double glazing is surreal; 2ndary glazing is just supra-real.

Gustave Curtain

Anchored by the usual system of rings and clips, the light yet opaque bedroom-window curtain shields me behind its chocolate-brown color, as oblique as Style itself. I can’t dissociate this modest flea-market cloth from the “merino dressing gown” that betrays Madame Arnoux’s decline in Sentimental Education. Well aware of the slippery slopes of kitsch, not to mention the monetary ambitions that led Arnoux, the proprietor of L’Art Industriel, to abandon his store, the Flaubert-like security guard who led me through the drapery department of the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville seemed determined to solve every single 1 of my problems: “Since we can no longer dwell in marble halls and wear the purple, recline on hummingbird-feather divans, enjoy swansdown carpets, ebony chairs, tortoiseshell floors, solid gold candelabras, lamps carved in emerald…” but I cut him off before he could intone Flaubert’s injunction to “take flight into the ideal” and insisted on being practical: let’s rent some office chairs, some extra radiators, and curtains without floral prints!

Little Prairie in the House

At the foot of my bed, a nearly empty, virgin 1 m2 territory is like a little prairie. There should be other untamed spaces like this in my home, empty stretches for the eye to enjoy. Like the barely known vacant lots of Paris, this miniprairie has unfortunately been overshadowed by the rest of my home rather than showcased in all its untamed beauty.

Sitting Wrong

Here is another chair, the 5th and last of its set, in which I never sit: I only utilize upright and prostrate positions in my bedroom. This duality simplifies the room. The presence of this chair could spark a discussion of whether my bedroom might double as an intimate sitting room, but the bed’s entreaties to come and lie down put an end to such conversations with a historically proven efficacy. Sitting here in this chair, I’d feel like I was waiting for a verdict, especially since this chair is set diagonally, in the dunce’s corner, right by the 3rd radiator. It would be wrong for me to sit there. So I use it as a place to set my clothes.

In the Corner

Ready to flee this thankless prairie, I succumb to the appeal of the corner. Turning the chair flat against the wall, I stand there. Turning my back to the room, I focus on myself. Spontaneously, I put my hands on my legs. Silence. A welcome, meditative feeling arises in me facing this lifeless little corner, which I immediately depart because I can never stay in 1 church for long. It’s cold there.

Wasting Energy

I turn on the 3rd radiator and also open the January window. Cold air and hot air battle. I air out my room but still take advantage of the warmth: these contraries balance out at the cost of an extraordinary waste of energy. Ruination may be pounding on our windows, but at least it’s a warm ruination.

Another Angle

I shut the window, I turn around: as my left foot touches the chair leg and my hand reaches for the office-door handle, my eye strays diagonally 6 meters off and catches the angle of the edge of my sink. I’m physically in my bedroom, visually in my kitchen, virtually in my office, mentally who knows where.

Junction!

Here we are now in the middle of the bedroom; I take 1 step toward the shut office door; the junction described supra (← OFFICE) is now manifest. The armoire is 1 meter in front of us. I sweep my hand over this monument’s face and utter a welcoming phrase to the Penates. They urge me, in turn, to pause for a minute and drink something in the kitchen, after a detour through my office, a path I rarely take.

Strait Is the Gate

It’s rather difficult to squeeze through the office door, as it can so easily collide with the left corner of my desk, only 49 centimeters off; but it’s wonderful to slip into a room like an actor onto the stage, through this straitened gate. Another detail that complicates access to the office: the door is given to sticking, while the handle is loose; to shut the door, I have to slam it. This simple solution often ends in a double failure as the handle then falls out and the door rebounds, hitting the corner of my desk. Defying this fragile white handle, held in place by just 2 nails, I’ve turned its bedroom side into a purely ornamental piece by draping it with a long azure-and-silver Charvet bag, which shines its light over all my nearby furnishings, endowing them with a smidgen of the opulence of the place Vendôme.

Bad Housekeeping

It behooves me to fix this door handle, but I won’t do it. I can’t. Inhibition, far stronger than any threat of collapse, paralyzes me. If nails can’t set everything to rights, then what can? Better to blaze my trail through some other locus.

Zimmer

So I return through the usual entrance, a glass in my hand, and I install myself at the Meblutil card table that I set up in whatever room I like. Whenever I bring a glass into my bedroom, a glass of wine, for example, I’m not sure whether my bedroom is still my bedroom. It becomes a bar. 1 small red drop falls by accident on my USB drive, and flows onto the cloth covering the card table.

Not in the Cards

My grandfather, a bridge champion, tried to teach me the basics of his game, but, confronted with my unwillingness to understand, he lost patience: it just wasn’t in the cards. Still by the card table, I look down at the drying red stain and then, with the weariness of a surveyor near the end of his work, up at the huge armoire awaiting me. I summon up my courage. I press onward.

Garden Bazaar

On the left side of the armoire, a low semicircular piece of furniture (80 cm) catches my attention; it’s a veranda planter, in dark-green metal, from the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, that’s never held any plant. Still, it holds some traces of its intended purpose, because it never moves, though getting rid of it would certainly bring me closer to the ideal lack of furnishings to which I aspire, and which, in all honesty, I haven’t gotten too close to achieving. And, come to think of it, I’m not even positive it came from the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, that department store which inspired the decorative imagination of so many shoppers before renouncing its stature as a high temple of commerce. This 3-level planter is a parasite here in its corner; all it does is buttress a few knickknacks.

Bag Showcase

Its openwork base has become a sort of bag showcase in which my irresponsibility is given free rein: here, derivative folk art (grocery bags) and tote bags commingle almost sexually. Brand-name bags are the stars of the parade, so I’ve set them on top, with a special place for the 1 bearing a yellow & black rectangle framed by sandy arabesques and the words Franck & Fils around its perimeter. It’s mirrored by the orange Sentou bag on its right, which hangs from the Charvet while holding a lily-and-pink Diane von Furstenberg. The bags on the 2 lower rungs are 3 in number: a small gray bag I consider my swimming bag; a black shopping bag that’s my work bag; a rust-colored bag serving as my weekend bag. (By some miracle, I never have weekends that involve swimming + work, so conflicts don’t arise.) I’ve separated out most of the grocery bags, which are currently doing double duty as soldiers shielding my vacuum cleaner from judgmental eyes (← KITCHEN). Down with all strictly utilitarian bags! Not a single artist’s studio could tolerate their wholesale mixture, an ED bag getting frisky with an Hermès bag, a Fnac + a Darty in a La Hune with a Leclerc … But in the end, to be honest, there’s no special allure to this bag showcase. They’re actually all just lying there, on the floor, or just about. They’re shapeless and soft. Wait, I’ll try sprucing them up.

Object Palette

On a low platform, the painter arranges all the objects that starred in the fresco of his life. Jugs, pitchers, plates, vases, carafes all side-by-side. Duplicates and pointless decorations standing shoulder to shoulder. Then he photographs them. If Matisse were a decorator, he’d simply be known as Hank.

From Dresser to Dressing Room

It takes only 1 step to get from the dresser to the bit of bedroom space that I consider my dressing room. The ideal apartment (which I’ve given up on) would have, adjacent to the bedroom, a wholly separate dressing room allowing 1 to cleanse the bedroom of every adventitious element, to consecrate it solely to its eponymous activity. Having the armoire in the bedroom makes it stranger, or more familiar, depending on what role we consider clothes to play in the fabric of our days.

Cover These Fabrics

As the armoire is to the bedroom what the bookshelves are to the office, I had them both built by the same craftsman, out of the same light-brown material. But, unlike the bookshelves, my clothes shelves are curtained off, protected from prying eyes. The culture we live in encourages book fairs, but curtains off clothing stores. Detrimental dust and tarnishing light do suffice as justifications; besides, clothes have to retain their element of surprise. And, just think, the curtain necessary to fully conceal my library would be colossal.

Furniture Display

Filling half the wall, the 190-cm-long, 60-cm-deep armoire reaches 2.50 m to the ceiling. An edifice that I honor, as such, conceptual errors and all—the cruelest of which I’m responsible for being its lack of ambition: instead of having it go all the way across the wall, or at least to the office door, I left (oh, why??) an empty 60-cm-wide space from its left edge to the door … and what stings all the more is that this wasted space has been contaminated by my bag showcase.

Reasons for Smallness

I have to reconstruct from scratch the genealogy of this failure in westward expansion, which keeps me from being able to fit all my clothing in my armoire (and forces me to use the closet as an auxiliary). At 1st I thought its volume would be excessive, but as it was constructed, I actually asked its builder to make it a bit bigger. Disappointed by the result, I repeated my request, increasing his annoyance and my fees. I had to insist on the 3rd enlargement: I saw in the artisan’s unexpected smile his disdain at my owning so many clothes, a prospect that was evidently as foreign to him as owning children’s toys would be to me.

Happiness

Happiness is not having children, is not having to have children’s rooms.

Capital Improvement

When I leave this apartment, with all the speed of a flame devouring a certified document, I’ll leave the armoire (and the bookshelves) to my successor. In legal terms, these 2 pieces of furniture have been made part and parcel of the apartment itself, which is clearly a capital improvement.

I once randomly found myself in a sumptuous apartment. The white living room was adorned with splendid concentric red circles adjoining 1 another. I happened to return to that same apartment several months later. It had changed hands. I asked the new owner what he’d done with the Felice Varini. “Those red things? Oh, we got rid of them.”

Dual Matter

2 curtains split the armoire into 2 equal parts: the left covered by a brown cotton curtain (matching the window curtain); the right by a denim curtain (matching the 1 in the office). There’s no special significance in allocating particular colors to particular halves, but there has to be some country or company that champions blue and brown … that said, I can’t think of any flag or standard made of heterogeneous materials.

Nicer Covered

Although its contents are fundamentally “aesthetic,” this massive piece of furniture looks nicer covered: when the curtains are open, it loses its composure.

Left Hemisphere

The left and larger side of the armoire holds shirts, the smaller my coats; the lower space, down to the floorboards, is clearly full.

A Technophilic Arm

I should draw attention to the ingenious device here that allows a person of average height (1.75 m) hoping to grab a shirt not to have to stand on tiptoe (which still wouldn’t do the trick) to reach his goal 2.40 meters up. My shirts are hung on a bar with a pull-down arm that just has to be tugged on for the shirts to descend from the uppermost reaches of the armoire down to human height. This mechanism of Germanic invention then returns to its original state, after a gentle push in the opposite direction that slowly brings the shirts back to their perch, as on a crane. This is 1 of those rare technical conveniences that I actually find useful, but this particular apparatus was unfortunately tarnished by an installation error. Since it wasn’t set up as carefully as it should have been, I have to yank down the moving arm quickly to make sure my shirts don’t fall; when the arm moves too slowly, the hangers laden with shirts all answer l’appel du vide and scatter everywhere. The reason is that it’s folded too far back because of the height—greater than mine—of the man who installed it. The large number of shirts hung here keeps me from using this device with the ease it was designed to ensure, so in practice I almost never do. I have to use the Tam Tam stool that always sits in front of the armoire’s right side. In other words, this machine, for all its ingenuity, is useless. The only reason to actually use it would be if I wanted to send all my nicely ironed shirts crashing to the floor.

In theory, machines should delight me; in practice, they are the bane of my existence, since I just can’t make them work well; like so many other literati, I was raised in a Luddite environment, and its traces linger. Progressivism means overcoming the stigmas we have attached to any opposing religion(s), but my daily life still hews to my inborn tendencies: that is, a murky and superstitious relationship to all technology. Everything I touch falls apart—and the fact that I can’t take advantage of this pull-down closet rod, even though I paid for it, merely confirms for me the antipathy in which I am held by all machines.

I, Engineer

Ludism: delight in playing.

Luddism: breaking machines.

My ism: playing with machines.

Parade

I don’t know how to make things work, so I’ve focused my energy on words; I don’t have a practical bone in my body, so I’ve become contemplative instead. Sometimes I just look at my shirts and their fine colors, admiring them instead of reaching for them.

Left/Right Shirts

The black pull-down arm hangs vertically from the middle of the nickel-plated bar, and serves to separate my shirts—I organize my things around the defeats I’ve suffered. This shifting boundary, sliding back and forth, maintains 2 simple, seasonal categories: to the left, summer shirts; to the right, winter shirts. A fairly artificial distinction, actually: the left side really just holds out-of-season shirts, such as winter shirts during the summer, and vice versa. As for the intermediary seasons, they do admittedly muddy this theoretical divide: today, March 19, on the cusp of spring, the summer shirts remain on the left, but are getting ready to sally forth to the right; it’s still chilly, but they do want to remind me of their existence. This binary, left/right classification principle therefore makes the left side (the narrower side) the “unused” side, and the right side (the well-stocked side) the current season’s side.

If it’s relatively easy to shelve books alphabetically, organizing clothes, which fit into so many categories at the same time (cloth, color, brand, type of collar, etc.), calls for a little more flexibility. I own 24 shirts, 15 of them patterned and 9 solid: as I detail this breakdown, I realize that I’d rather it were the other way around, because this current stage in my personal evolution (my euphemism for aging) favors greater rigor, and so drives me toward the shirts of the 2nd category, whereas only a few months ago I was spending my money more … decoratively.

Monochromes

Among my monochromatic shirts (ergo, my “favorites”), bright colors predominate, except for 1 black shirt (size 38) that would instantly lose all its sophistication if a womanizer or perpetual partier or sports commentator decided to make it his shirt of choice. (Of course, I do recognize the unfortunate historical connotations of donning a Blackshirt, but then it also seems to me that upon Liberation every true Frenchman’s 1st act of freedom would be to construct his or her own style without any concerns, historical or otherwise, aside from being true to themselves.) Also hanging here is a cream-colored shirt with 12 small pairs of initials stitched around the belly, starting with P.S. and J.B. and corresponding to literary and artistic luminaries I’ve mostly forgotten. The only 1s I’m sure of now are P.S. for Philippe Sollers and J.B. for James Brown, although I repurposed the latter for my own secret use back when I acquired this piece of finery, so that J.B. now means Jeanne Balibar, an actress I adored, although she had no idea about it. This garment is nothing more than a museum piece now, representing the obsolete trend of shirts being worn not tight but rather baggy around the sides; I consider it ugly now, but no doubt future fads will force me to consider it beautiful again.

Blank Regret

My other solid shirts are pink, gray, blue, and mauve. I should state my regret at not having more white shirts (I count only 3): How can it be that the most beautiful style, and the simplest, has become so rare in my wardrobe? And I’m terrified by the absence of this simplicity, which seems to define my relationship to life as a whole—at least when that relationship isn’t being defined by my fear of stains.

Disciplinary Eroticism

I used to wear a set of air force shirts, which corresponded precisely to my ideal of simplicity and uniformity: sky blue or white, with stiff collars and epaulets, easy to wash, wrinkle-resistant, drying at record speed, these shirts offered so many benefits that I bought 9 at the unbeatable price of €15 each at the Montreuil market, a purchase accompanied by the violent joy of having broken away from the exorbitance of fashion. In my moments of rational folly, I dream of dressing the same way every day, in a single definitive outfit, easily refreshed by purchasing a few more duplicates, and tempered only by several seasonal variations: air force shirt, jeans, black shoes. This would resolve the eternal question of what to wear, much as Communist China did when it adopted that uniform which made an entire population sexy.

Patterned Shirts

My patterned shirts would seem to reveal a penchant for sartorial gaiety, even though I completely reject that notion: happy and sad are qualifications that have no place in my conception of clothes, which is defined instead by a severity only somewhat alleviated by color. My shirts, whether striped or plaid, Liberty brand with mauve flower prints or gray scrollwork, are the foundation that allow for the occasional faint glimmer of joy. Less definitive than tattoos, our bodily wallpaper forever whirls around the carousel of fashion. The perpetually changing variety of motifs exhausts multicolor shirts far more quickly than other clothes. The allure of patterns is more obvious than that of the sobriety of solids, but such charm is fleeting. Hysteria ages badly; neurosis endures.

Slightly Too Big

The problem posed by shirts, as with other clothing, is always the same for me: I tend to go for sizes slightly too big, shapes slightly too baggy. And yet my preference is for form-fitting clothes: the closer I get to skintight, the closer I am to perfect ergonomics. For a long while, my favorite shirt was a white size-38 army shirt. But delusions of grandeur led me to the serious error, since there were no more 38s left, of buying several 39s. Only too late did I recognize the dangers of buying a size too large: there’s clearly a reason that people who can afford it have their clothing made to measure, but what’s less clear to me is why I keep on making this same mistake; perhaps because I’m scared of not being big enough? Which in a literary context might be termed the fear of being a fop.

Proportional Lies

Clothes too big / apartment too small.

Down Low in the Armoire

The lower shelf holds my various body-length winter clothes. The instant I approach it, however, the goddess Vanity descends upon me and ushers me onward.

Unburberrying Myself

I have 2 raincoats. 1 is a perfect knockoff of the Burberry style. I rarely wear it, although I love it, consistent with the endlessly frustrating paradox according to which I use what I love as little as possible. I wear this raincoat ostentatiously: the Burberry, identifiable by its distinctive features—half-belt, detachable hood, epaulets, its mythical proportions giving men classic-film-star physiques—is, admittedly, weighted down with associations … And it’s hard to escape this welter of imagery when wearing a Burberry, because wearing it means clothing myself in an image that I always worry might be perceived as ridiculous. It’s not a far-fetched worry, either: on a drizzly day 1 of those perfectly coiffed African men from Château-d’Eau yelled at me, admiringly, “Belmondo!” The secret to successfully wearing a Burberry is that of unburberrying myself, which is necessary so that I don’t sink into the stylistic anachronism or misplaced heroism of those Jean-Pierre Melville films where such coats are worn so elegantly along with black Ray-Bans and Stetsons. I have done meticulous research into the dos and don’ts of unburberrying: wearing an Indian-print scarf or a brightly colored shirt is the 1st step; next, to tone down the policeman look, make sure to keep the coat’s belt undone; also, so it doesn’t look overbearing on someone who just wants to look classy, it has to be worn when in a good mood. All in all, it’s best worn when there’s heavy rain, when its function augments its status and asserts its authority. The cobalt color on this 1 is the coup de grâce.

My other raincoat, cream-colored, falling below my knees, is less complicated; even on its hanger, its slightly crinkled look makes it much more benign. This intangible difference between a piece of clothing on the rack and on 1’s shoulders is 1 of style’s greatest charms, and nothing is more astonishing than discovering just how much an item you like genuinely suits you; nothing, inversely, is more disappointing than something that loses its charm as soon as it’s on its wearer’s body. This raincoat—more “modern” than the Burberry—is easier to wear. On rainy days, I like to alternate between burberrying and putting on this substitute, breaking up my meteorological monotony with this variation in garments that lets me trudge through water just as easily as through different neighborhoods or through different eras.

Quick-Change Act

Sometimes I have to change several times in 1 day, wearing something at night I wasn’t wearing in the morning, switching my clothes in the afternoon—and so sing the praises of sartorial interchangeability in the service of our desires, as changeable as our own mental weather. Fregolism is an antidote to the gloominess of life. By contrast, furniture is so stolidly solid.

Bicoatal

My 2 heavy coats are black yet dissimilar. My nice wool coat extends to my knees; it’s both soft and warm, shapes my body almost theatrically with its fitted proportions and its sharp collar that, when popped, reminds me of a bat, or maybe of Louis Jouvet. My nice cashmere coat ought to be just as perfectly cut, though, for reasons that are likely to remain a mystery to me (I had it made in Guangzhou for a sum 10 times less than its French equivalent), it arrived, like my shirts, slightly too big. Still, I replaced its fat plastic buttons, which betrayed its global origins, at the Dreyfus market. Even if we must accept that the Chinese have won the war over textiles, the battle for such little details is still being fought. Literature itself, which is by contrast a rather small business, hasn’t tried half as hard to seize the global market—but what if, instead of complaining, we literati took some pleasure in occupying this cozier niche?

Site Comments

“Why do you keep saying ‘my nice coat’?”

“Because I’m far too sentimental.”

Stylish System

My most faithful remaining article of clothing (the others have all ended up in the donation bin at the 10th arrondissement’s town hall) is 1 green velvet-paneled fitted and rather light coat—a redingote, in fact—that has, alas, started to show irrevocable signs of wear and tear, especially at the elbows, which looked identical to each other when I bought it but no longer seem to match. Thanks to its soft material, as well as its shape, which the 19th century championed as the platonic form of male dress, this fantastical garment brings together 2 eras, 1 real (that of its acquisition) and the other historical (that of its fabrication). I was happy that distant day in May 1994 when I set aside a considerable sum for this talisman, as beautiful as a woman … But when I think of those bewildering movie-star ingenues who demand so much generally fruitless effort for their attention, I know I’d rather spend my time buying clothes like this for myself.

I Stay New

Beau Brummell weathered his clothes to give them some added character. In contrast, it’s the gleam of the new that intrigues me, and I like thinking that 1 new entry in my armoire will rejuvenate the rest of it, hoping to keep that newness intact for as long as possible by hiding the recent arrival behind my curtains as well as my dry cleaner’s clear plastic protectors—not unlike condoms, which, rather than sounding the death knell of desire, as some claim, sound the charge for making love. I found this fitted coat so beautiful that I waited months before wearing it, unable to stop thinking about how doing so would hasten its degradation. In the end, I’ve barely ever worn it at all. But what more should I have expected of myself? Even when I was a child, images and words were always more than enough for me; I never was like other people fixated on using—and using up—things.

Dark Side

In nearly identical colors, dark or black, my 6 suits lead me to think, perhaps wrongly, that all it would take to establish equality among men is for them to don these matching uniforms. These garments of mine know I’m looking for a way to reconcile my violently opposed inclinations between conformity and individuality. And if I can’t find such a way, my mood will get just as dark as they are.

Suiting Myself

Under their black Bon Marché fitted and zippered covers (which remind me how consummately ironic the store’s name is), 2 3-piece suits are sleeping. I sometimes wake them up just to make myself feel different. I’d love to wear suits more often, but something holds me back—not something financial, because there are certainly affordable suits out there (the black 1 and the garnet 1 were €200 each), but rather something in their tone. For some, that tone might seem archaic; for me, it’s my epitome. The less that suits are worn, the more they make a statement: acceptable for the occasional event, a risk to my reputation if worn more often. Suits come and go. Their detractors make them out to be symbols of conventionality or coldheartedness, and indeed when all is said and done most people wear them only when they have no alternative. As an outsider who’s sometimes outright hostile to these ignorant attacks on my freedom to enjoy things for what they are, however, I take pleasure in wearing suits anytime they’re welcome, and I certainly try not to be a snob when I do so. Maybe it’s easier to be humble because I know that my ideal suit doesn’t exist: I have to consider the suits I do own as substandard—so I rarely wear them.

Tomyskin

Reticence seeps through the cloth fibers to my skin. I have to choose. I forget my flesh in favor of fashion.

Structuralist Suitcase

At the very bottom, resting on the floorboards, is my seasonal suitcase, blue and bearing a label that says ÉTÉ, which fits snugly within the armoire. Pulling out clothes for particular seasons is a delicate operation, because the 4 actual seasons of reality have been reduced to 1 binary division—winter/summer—agreed upon by society. Summer items have a short shelf life, while those for winter never experience this internal exile, being useful for the adjoining seasons as well, and so always stay hung up. This practice (and this suitcase) was handed down to me by my mother, who, when I was young, would always say in May that it was time to “pull out summer” but never in October that it was time to “pull out winter”: this oppositional principle functioned only in 1 direction, and maybe I should credit this incomplete practice for my structuralist orientation, wherein everything has its opposite in the realm of signification, and all else results from a single system of subtle differences.

Pulling it open, I see 2 heaps: midsummer clothes (T-shirts, bright jackets, light pants) and “countryside” clothes (pullovers, old pants, defectors that’ll show their true colors only outside big cities). It’s not often that I go to the countryside, but I still keep these worn-out clothes around, perfect for running through the grass and the wind. Wearing these half-forgotten clothes in nature feels like making amends to an old foe.

Mainstream Summer

Thin shirts, bright jackets, you just don’t excite me as much as autumn outfits. Elegance goes on vacation in the summer, when keeping cool is all that our culture demands of us, when lousy design goes mainstream: here, 2 short-sleeved Lacoste polo shirts (1 chardonnay green, 1 burgundy red) and 1 with long sleeves (vermilion) help me pass for normal, since those crocodiles have sunk their conformist teeth into the whole world. I also have 1 XS black polo that isn’t too well suited to the sun, unless we round it out with the Tuareg style of full-body desert dress. My white pants come out only when I’m positive it’s not going to rain: I’ve broken this rule just 1 time in my life, and that was 1 time too many. My summer jackets are total shams, pathetic excuses for clothing: 1 is cotton with blue stripes so narrow they hurt my eyes like a Bridget Riley op art painting; the other is white greige, which I’ve only ever worn briefly, thanks to a friend who informed me that “a white jacket makes you look like a café waiter!” While I don’t share his opinion, nor his tendency to essentialize clothing, it should nonetheless go without saying that I have no desire to violate his edict and so find myself being waved at by strangers trying to get their checks.

Packing in Progress

Balanced on top of this suitcase is my travel suitcase. Its color (charcoal) and its brand (Jump) aren’t as interesting as its wheels and its 20-kilo allowance. Disregarding all the exotic prospects it seems to hint at, I use it as often for short getaways as for long trips. The problem with this suitcase is the purported improvement of its extendable handle, which allows it to be towed—a recent and very popular invention. But this handle extends only so far as to make sure that as I pull it along, it bumps against my heels. Well made and badly made trip over each other.

Well Traveled

A suitcase in full view is always somewhat displeasing (especially if it functions as additional storage, especially when it’s plopped on top of a dresser I could be using instead). Extracted from the depths of the armoire, my suitcase stands empty, awaiting its orders. A wheelchair might have its arms out to welcome its user, but suitcases—especially when they’re at home and simply being used as additional storage—encase a dreary stagnation that their few airport tags barely do anything to offset. Next to the GALERIES LAFAYETTE label that I left on it because it’s red and sets it apart from other pieces of luggage at the baggage claim, there’s also a sticker from MALAISE AIRLINES, an imperfect translation perfectly expressing my feelings about the current mania for long-haul travel. Pulling it out of its berth, I lift it easily (as in those B movies where the star runs with a suitcase in his hands), and set it rolling on the floor. These casters, which were practically nonexistent before the ’80s, have enabled a much greater freedom of movement, it’s true. Maneuver a suitcase through your various rooms (the living room being the most appropriate) and after hearing all the usual remarks (“Off on a trip?”), you’ll feel like you need to get yourself someplace exotic immediately.

Mobile Home

I won’t describe any of my trips. I’m voyaging around my bedroom, that’s all. My suitcase makes me nauseous.

The Racquet Racket

In this suitcase I find a black shoulder bag bought at a mall in Quentin-en-Yvelines to reward myself after a particularly crazy day of work; I use it for badminton, that sport I’ve played once a decade for the last 10 years. It holds just my Babolat racquet, weighing a delightful 80 grams: proof positive that strength likes subtlety. I pull it out of its cover and then am overcome by an enormous burst of laughter: I’ve suddenly remembered my friends and me all donning these covers as though they were the grotesque caps of some imaginary sect, as we all yell out the rallying cry of “Babolaaat!”

Frame of Reference

I press my face against the racquet and walk through the apartment. Reality filtered through a net. I fence in everything around me: to see is to impose a frame across the entire world.

Right Hemisphere

Now I’m ready for the right side of the armoire, which has 3 areas: the upper section with 3 open spaces, the center bar holding pants and jackets, and the lower section with 2 shoe drawers.

Bedlam

The uppermost of these spaces, just under the ceiling, poses a particular problem for those, like myself, who don’t have stepladders (and refuse to keep them: my collectivist sentiments regarding subservient objects, from tools [← ENTRYWAY] to stepladders [not here, evidently], are well-known). To really plumb its depths, since all I can see is what’s already sticking out, it’s not enough for me to stand on a chair; I have to get even higher by setting a Tam Tam stool on top of a chair, though not until I’ve checked and rechecked how stable my perch will be; still, the moment I’ve ascended to this 2nd platform, the true precariousness of my situation makes itself felt, and at my 1st—quite possibly fatal—movement, the stool slips, the chair shifts, under my 65 kilos, obliging me to grasp desperately at the edges of my shelves, then at the curtains. The curtain rod comes loose and then the whole ensemble plummets to the floor, myself included, transforming my bedroom into a grotesque sketch of disorder triumphant. I’ve been defeated: I thought I’d be able to reduce time’s erosion of these various objects in my home, but by refusing to own a stepladder I’ve condemned myself to collapse all the same; I’ve been vanquished by the need to buy 1, at some point, because not having 1 only multiplies the annoyances of, and hours wasted on, dealing with its absence.

Unread Balzac

What’s hidden up here? No real surprises: covers, quilts, and various fabrics in numerous colors from blue to gold by way of gleaming black, as well as a mothball resembling a Christmas tree ornament—basically a heap of mildly interesting objects that I’ve found the energy to mention only by thinking of Balzac, the Balzac that I’ve never read.

The Rolled-Up Poster

This ensemble is rounded out by several rolled-up posters that are here only because there isn’t any better place to put them; such posters, lacking any designated space of their own (aside from the walls on which they might, I suppose, be mounted), have to be kept in a protective space, where they’ll stay intact, safe from moisture or disturbance. Thanks to my clerical tendencies, I now feel the need to unroll them and see what they depict, because I’d practically forgotten these even existed: here, for example, is an imaginary flag depicting the Star of David superimposed upon the colors of an Arab country in a pacifist statement that struck me as so facile that I just filed it away in this cubbyhole. And then … well, there are plenty of other posters here too, but I find that I don’t, after all, have the patience to open each 1: to justify this momentary laziness, I’ll posit the following aesthetic axiom regarding the perception of works of art, stating that a given piece, made to be seen, only exists in being seen. Like unperformed theatrical pieces, unmounted posters simply don’t exist—and so we can safely pass over the remainder.

Sporting Goods

At the edge of the space below, easily accessible, I’ve set a box of athletic clothes, including 2 near-identical outfits, both for the sake of simplicity and out of a personal preference for doubles—I’d like to write a short story retelling the life of a man who did everything twice. The backup outfit is a pair of tracksuit pants + a T-shirt, both the same brand, but not the same shade of gray (which disappoints me, because I like uniform uniforms), and decorated (unlike the primary 1) with the 1st 10 whole numbers iron-transferred onto the cloth (which are starting to peel away from so many wash cycles), making a conga line (0123456789) enigmatic enough that a friendly girl asked me 1 day during a soccer game, “Is that your phone number?” to which I had only the pitiful riposte “Sure.” The other outfit is the 1 I sport more often. The fact that it’s almost completely supplanted the original outfit suggests that my preference for doubles is actually 1 for identical duplicates—otherwise I’d wear my “backup” clothes more often than I do. This outfit is made up of a satiny black V-neck T-shirt that dries extremely quickly + a pair of pants made of the same material but in midnight blue, both halves belonging to that charmed category of clothing known as “sportswear,” which appellation has allowed a not-insignificant portion of the population to transcend stigmatization on account of their style and be declared masters of elegance thanks to 1 of those democratic reversals the modern world is privileged to effect.

Also among these items is 1 of my favorite pieces of clothing, a sweatshirt with sky blue hood that I use not only for badminton but also in specific weather conditions: when it’s mild, gray, and drizzly. The poetry of that particular sort of day—Loire Valley or Île-de-France weather—inheres in this polo, so intimately associated with it, and augments the pleasure of wearing the hood so beloved by monks and rappers. I should add, for self-criticism’s sake, that there’s also a T-shirt here bearing the logo of the sports club I belong to, which I never wear because I think it’s hideous: I detest all forms of servitude, so there’s no chance I’d ever wear a shirt I didn’t pick out myself—particularly a communal shirt put together by graphic designers. Its fate is clear—a rag for waxing.

Laundry

Thoughtfully set aside here are 9 bath towels and 4 tablecloths making up a “linen closet” already doomed to failure. These poorly folded, never-ironed linens have quickly piled up, making the armoire curtain indispensable for hiding teetering towers of textiles, clean and colorful heaps that look pathetic nonetheless and hardly worthy of Zola’s famous White Sale in The Ladies’ Delight. Really, they’re not even remotely spectacular; they certainly don’t even deserve to be window dressing in this kingdom I call my armoire.

Sweatspace

The 3rd organizational space in this upper section is at mouth level. Here is where my sweaters sit (12 of them) in 2 piles. There are winter sweaters, like the traditional wool navy sweater with buttons down the shoulder, a gift from my girlfriend, favored by certain kinds of men (usually young, usually cool); though it reminds me of the Breton childhood I never had, and its moist wool is usually scratchy, it’s still my favorite by a landslide. My other sweaters, all unapologetically classical, in gray or blue or black wool—except for 1 troublemaker, an electric-blue cashmere number—are all V-necks save 3, which are turtlenecks: a design choice with which I have a rather complicated relationship.

Despotic Collars

The aesthetic of eternally classic turtlenecks, which draw attention to the neck while also protecting it, offers a reprieve from standard-issue shirts and from keeping up with the latest styles. Its stylishness calls to mind both Duras and Robbe-Grillet, the ’70s, the lower ranks of the priesthood, and the casually relaxed style of a particular sort of alternative bourgeoisie as depicted in New Wave films; but, my neck being particularly ill-suited to the collar (like all Taureans, my neck is massive), I dread this textile prison, especially when it’s wool. The prospect of donning this noose, this ruff of anguish that threatens to choke me in so much cloth, means that I tend to avoid these sweater-gallows, no matter how desperate I am to fit in physically and sartorially. In order to make them tolerable, I have to double them with a looser cotton turtleneck sweater (infra) that provides an underlayer and also gets rid of the constricting sensation. It would seem, therefore, that the turtleneck I so revere is by its nature oppressive to my ideas of art and life, as if its charm depended on some degree of physical discomfort, on a threat proportionate to its evident stylishness. There has to be some form for the content of a work of art to affect me, but I have to be convinced that this form has arisen from life itself, much as the torso beneath the sweater gives shape to the sweater’s cloth. For me, writing is born of the threat that wool poses to my skin, the fear that it will constrict and compress my body; it makes me break out in sweat and sentences alike. I have to express it somehow, otherwise I’d be curled up tighter than that turtleneck collar, staring endlessly and helplessly at my never-finished work.

Body of the Building

I bring the sweater’s seams to my nose. The armpits smell strong. I must have a body. A paint blister bursts on the side wall.

Vice Versa Is as Good as Versa Vice

Another delightful, camel-colored, uncommon sweater (I’ve ordered these adjectives to underscore this uncommonness) with red piping around the wrists bears the oddity of visible cuts on its shoulders and sides, blurring but not abolishing the notions of vice and versa. I won’t claim that the interior and the exterior are interchangeable, but they’re as inseparable as the wool is to its knitting.

When La doublure Means “The Clothes’ Lining”

Raymond Roussel, that author of La doublure, double stitched a small square of white cloth onto the lining of his clothes so he could make a pencil mark there for every use. I haven’t gone so far; the need to list my possessions allows me to enumerate them without having to line them.

Surplus

I can see, however, that their role in my book has been mainly to drown me under their mass and so keep me from properly revealing myself: forever delaying my laying myself bare, and so trying, through this continual postponement, to stymie this auto-autopsy. They keep enticing me to try them on, but to do so would be a trap. My struggle to stay focused leads me behind a windbreaker embellished with letters in gold spelling out Marshal Lyautey’s precept “Montrer sa force pour ne pas avoir à s’en servir” (“Strength should be shown so it need not be used”). But if I let these clothes have their way, I’d end up disappearing beneath my vestments, since I’d have lost my home to the frenzy of filling it.

When La doublure Means “The Understudy”

And every so often my characters stand in for me; all it takes is the right outfit. Which is how this red tartan-print shirt makes me out to be an alcoholic à la Dean Martin in Rio Bravo, a role that touches me just as much as do all those failures out there who are struggling to regain their dignity.

The Particular Warmth of Undersweaters

To the right of the sweaters are the 6 lighter turtlenecks made of cotton mentioned supra, which I either wear under wool sweaters as protection or with no outer layer at all, weather permitting. They’re cheap brands, which disnoble my body so accustomed to being draped in classier brands. I love them dearly, and grant them the same affection I hold for special friends or protectors. We have a few clothes friends but very few clotheser friends; they’re not the same at all. And then, on the far right, are 7 white T-shirts that I only wear, paradoxically, in winter, because their function is to be underwear rather than a way of showing off my muscles. All these undergarments (call them undersweaters if you will, I for 1 plan to) share 1 fundamental quality in my eyes, which is that of human warmth, which is precisely what I look for in my relationships with others, and which I find only rarely. An underappreciated form of dandyism: warm dandyism, call now for your free sample.

Ascetic Tights

Behind this easily accessed row, though still retrievable if I reach all the way in, I’ve stored my less fashionable underthings. 1st come 4 cotton long johns, very useful in the winter, and which I wear to assuage not only my horror of cold, but also my horror of wool: it’s true that I’m terrified of the cold, but I love winter for giving me the opportunity to overcome it, and the challenge offered us by this little-loved season is offset by its aesthetic superiority. Winter spurs man’s cleverness. Long johns make me look like a “French kickboxer” if I wear them on their own—which I never do. Their silliness is poignant but remains unseen; I may be old-fashioned, but never retro. Tights remind me of 2ndary glazings; they halve the chill of reality.

Duke of Disguise

2 shoeboxes full of trinkets round out this ensemble, each 1 adding a little something. Here the boundary between vestment and accoutrement is hazy: 1 red swimming cap resembling a yarmulke, 1 black & white vest typical of corrida aficionados, the string tie Robert Mitchum wore in The Night of the Hunter, 1 itchy lumberjack’s cap, Robert Vaughn’s black leather gloves from The Magnificent 7, 1 wool hood with protective neck drape, 1 army jacket bought at the flea market having recently been seen on the backs of many penniless civilians, and the bow tie worn only 2 times in my life, with very specific outfits. I was a decorator, and now I’m an outfitter.

Full Art

Out of this virtual panoply I extract 16 silk scarves, those thoroughly engineered addenda to Beauty: purple square, yellow Broadway bandana, gray Lyon bandana, olive satin, appealing amanita, crimson monkey, Chaulet black, mustard pear, pergola blue, field grape, satinella, Chiang Kai-shek red, moldering bilberry, veranda green, black-speckled prazepam, late-harvest banana.

Ostentatious Fashion Model

Thanks to my particular way of refusing to submit to the scarcity economy, this neckwear assortment (which a slave to fashion might consider meager but a more honest man would call ridiculous) is regularly updated: less often than groceries, more often than furniture. 1 might assume that I’ve accumulated these thingummies to fill the ostentatious emptiness of the mini–leisure class to which I belong—an unpleasantly accurate theorem that is by no means short of proofs: plenty of other people, be they women or firemen, lions or seamstresses, dandies or floozies, do the same, all of them staving off that realization they’ll soon return to dust by digging up and cashing out their matured bonds. Accusations of wild consumerism and over-ostentation don’t interest me when it would be more appropriate to aim them at the entirety of this sinister, egoistic, and mediocre era. My possessions whisper to the fashion model in me: We don’t want to live Zen. (And neither, indeed, does the fashion model…)

Box of Opulence

Within the gleaming machinery of this apartment, the armoire is a world within a world, a box enclosing an attempt at opulence. Bereft of Comfort, deprived of Space, I use Clothing as my means of escape.

Modern Jacket

On the armoire’s chrome bar are, among various tops, my jackets: starting with the more modern variety, we have 1 denim with a lush faux fur collar, which strokes the neck with its hirsute caress; 1 khaki bomber jacket inflecting its militant style with a downy lightness; 1 black Harrington, popularized by the British proletariat, which I wear only on Monday nights; 2 extra-light jackets that are both inflammable and nonflammable; finally, 1 dark-blue (but not shiny) puffer jacket perfect for extremely cold days, its hood stuffed into a sausage-like collar—the only argument that convinced me to part with my money and my dignity for this monstrosity was that “it’ll make you look more modern.”

Imperfect Jacket

And now comes the more classical sort of jacket. Some of my suits call for a night-blue blazer that I’ve had taken in at the sleeves, and which has a manufacturing defect: its polyester padding pinches. Even having accepted that perfection is an empty ambition, I still can’t look past this jacket’s inferiority: I’m always finding something wrong with it, some infuriating detail, like its single inside pocket.

Can’t Quite Put My Finger on It

I’m pointing now, threateningly, at the jackets I’m not so sure about—this 1, in narrow-striped, deep-blue dyed wool, I liked so much I bought 2 of it (S and XS), whereupon I inexplicably stopped liking it—maybe it was that acquiring it had destroyed its uniqueness; that stiff cotton 1 makes me look like a Ric Hochet–style comic book character—and I feel the urge to go and repeat this dangerous act in every other part of the apartment I’d like to clear out properly.

Paying the Piper

But I have to finish my work, even as it grows more and more omphaloskeptic, and, as I run through all these items, accessories, and brand names, erase all trace of my former penury. I don’t care whether this abundance of objects makes me seem as though I’ve allowed myself to become corrupted by virtue of a lofty philosophy of habitation and appearances, when what I’m really doing is simply trying to bury the era during which, deep in debt and unable to live the materialist life, I couldn’t even give myself (any) credit.

Jacketed in Paris

I wanted to please, to declare my love for the world (the world isn’t the same as society). Because women have to be won over, let’s dress up—let’s suit up, in fact, just like everyone else (well, practically everyone—there are always a few heretics out there), hoping that this attention to the way I look will win me their favor as they judge my interior by my well-groomed exterior, in opposition to that old proverb about monks not being made by their habits. I bought my clothes in Paris. I’ve put on jackets. I’ve charged my suits with the responsibility of charming my conquests—a resounding failure. “That’s not how it’s done,” 1 of my friends said, apparently oblivious to the irony of his passing judgment as he reached new depths of inelegance by moving into a pathetic studio.

What Hangers?

On the bar, without any segue, come my pants, hanging by their feet from clip-top hangers. They’re hung 1 or 2 from each hanger, sometimes 3 for thin linens; it would be ideal for each hanger to correspond to a single pair of pants, but space (certainly) and negligence (perhaps) has kept me short of this goal. My 12 wooden hangers intermix with their plastic and brass homologues from various commercial establishments. The hanger, in all its inherent neutrality, intrigues those of us who are intrigued by organization. Hangers have a particularly pure functionality that allowed me to, if you remember, experience an artistic revelation … (← LIVING ROOM)

Pants Hung Low

This horizontal armada of pants hanging bottom-up produces a graphical relationship like the x and y axes of a graph. Just as the Hanged Man from the Tarot of Marseilles, far from suffering, smiles at the world upside down, this long series of trousers hangs here with all the insolence of people who can walk on their hands. They’re in good company, after all: this rack doesn’t have 1 hanged pair of pants, but rather 22.

Object Choices

In my armoire, every piece of clothing yells “Pick me!” They all preen on their hangers, bemoaning their disuse to the body that, standing undressed before them, could redeem them. Both factions wait, watch, hem and haw, before succumbing to a reciprocal union. Is it possible for the crook of a hanger to lure me with its dangling bait as if it were a fishing hook and I a fish? But I’m the predator here: I touch them, I rummage through them, I take my time to choose my prey and capture it. Then the empty hanger rocks back and forth, clinking delicately.

A Throw of the Dice Doesn’t Abolish Chance

My apartment is disparate but clothing wants to be uniform. Every morning the winning outfit amounts to a throw of the dice. I have to play quickly, wedding a top to a bottom that might go well with it. If I waver, I lose my place, I lose the game.

Jacket Uncertainties

My long-sleeved, gray wool 6-button jacket prolongs my hesitation, hanging lonely as 1 cloud. Just as the mustache I’m currently wearing situates me uneasily between Roussel and Mesrine, this jacket makes me waver—depending on whether I wear it open over my turtleneck or buttoned up tight over it—between looking like the fed-up son of a stockbroker and projecting the false amiability of a ’70s killer offering you a drink.

Working-Class Jeans

The dandy who wants the aristocratic pleasure of displeasure pulls on a pair of jeans and finds himself sporting a working-class desire to please.

Tone-on-Tone

This outfit is somber: I can’t keep it a secret anymore that these dark colors, my short hair, these turtlenecks, these straitlaced suits, and these inky pants all just serve to rekindle those puritan sensibilities I thought had long been extinguished in me. It’s true that there are some glimmers of color flashing in this gray-black sea: some light-blue, regal trim, some gleaming yellow velvet, a rainbow of sky blue, green, saffron, waterlily, pink, and, in a last gasp, red. But the occasional variegated diversion in my wardrobe gets me nowhere, ultimately fooling no 1.

REDRUM

Trap a hyperneurotic man in a red room, and he’ll quickly go insane. How could I have ever worn these raspberry-pink pants? I keep them around only because of their criminal color. I still have the utmost respect for the faded, accidental pink of 1 beloved shirt, however.

Clue

Miss Scarlet, in the bedroom, with the rope!

Siege Mentality

I’d rather define myself with costumes, disguises, and false outfits than strip down to my bare skin. But this display just keeps on spooling without stopping. My hordes overwhelm me. I’m stuck in a siege mentality. Bloodstained clothes dance before my eyes. What did my great-grandfather wear the day he died? And his wife—was she dressed to the 9s?

Step by Step

We are struggling our way through my wardrobe as we might through snow, sand, or sawdust—step by step, centimeter by centimeter.

Restrained Movements

I have to get down on the floor to reach the bottom of the armoire, where I keep my shoes, and a bend of the knees does the trick. Every time I fish for shoes, I squat rather than kneel, to stave off lumbago. That’s the game: how best to deviate from my normal posture. I’ve practiced every time I need to look at these shoes, just as gunmen in Westerns have mastered pushing doors open with their feet to keep their hands on their pistols. There are 2 drawers here with holes instead of knobs; I open them with my fingers, but shut them with the tips of my shoes. This measured movement is not without its consequence, which is that the drawer’s circumference is dotted with small black scuff marks. I love traces of this kind, which mark every home: indelible proof that people have lived full lives here.

Basketball Shoes

The lower drawer holds the least cool shoes—that is, athletic shoes. I wear them only once a week; their ugliness is therefore untouched (as is their whiteness, which stands out against the black outfit I wear when hitting shuttlecocks)—a massive, overstuffed ugliness that pads my feet so nothing can harm them; they have absolutely 0 physical defects except for being knockoffs made in China. In contrast, this pair of Spring Court tennis shoes delights me, pulling off the miraculous feat of reminding me, all at once, of my childhood, my adolescence, my young adulthood, and my maturity—in short, my entire life, from the ’60s to the present day: the brand disappeared from our cultural consciousness at 1 point before reappearing to extraordinary acclaim—it must have been revived by my generation. Exuding a particularly French elegance, from a gentler era, when sport was just 1 activity among many others and not a burgeoning industry, let alone a global phenomenon, their whiteness remains thoroughly white, demanding care that I’m not well equipped to provide: I’m unappreciative and lazy—far better at making public apologies. I also have some red Converse high-tops that I bought for no better reason than that they were trendy (even though I’m supposedly blessed with fashion-agnosticism), and which I’m sorry I ever bothered with, because they simply don’t suit me. But the longer this trend persists, to the point that it threatens to become a style of its own, the more these basketball shoes transcend the already porous boundary between fleeting trend and serious style, forcing me to concede that Converses suit other people the way Spring Courts suit me. I hurriedly put them in a plastic bag that I’ll only bring with me when I go hiking and nobody can see me wearing them.

Dirty Occident

I don’t like being barefoot at home, in the Oriental style, because the proof of my floors’ false cleanliness gets imprinted on my soles. To sidestep the shame of dirtied feet, the Occidental tactic is to dirty 1’s floors further with dress shoes and call that “normal.” We might think about it the way Stalin did: it may be shit, but it’s our shit. How odd that a communist gave us the best definition of property.

Walking Around the Room

Each morning I choose between 2 indoor slipper options: a pair of gray Moroccan babouches, thusly repurposed, or a pair of black espadrilles, which I use to make believe that it’s still summertime. In both cases, as I walk off in them, I opt for a sort of intentionally outrageous movement, which consists of dragging my feet as much as possible, making a disagreeable, dissonant noise against the parquetry: it’s my counteroffensive against the cult of the slipper. Between the clink of boots and the silence of slippers (Heidegger forced visitors to his hut in the Black Forest to wear the latter), there’s almost a harmony.

Cabinet of Quotations

A recess in my armoire serves as my imaginary repository of quotations, and in my mind I pull out, among the fabrics, Marshal Lyautey’s philosophical and decorative line that served me supra, as well as a line from Michel Foucault, which will serve me infra.

Dressing Up and Up and Up

The upper drawer holds my dress shoes. 7 pairs, soirée-ready. They gleam.

Black Troops

My compatriots tend to wear black boots, and I myself have 5 pairs. They allow us the joy of lacing past our ankles; a joy great enough that having to wear shorter shoes on nice days after so many wintry months stirs up a feeling of hyperthinness that all lovers of boots know intimately. My favorite Mansfields with square toes, which I wear too often, are falling apart: the tips are dented, there are plastic joins in the heels, cracks in the leather, scratches covered by layers of wax. Leather fetishists aren’t known for their subtlety, whereas the damaged leather of this civilian’s boots is more allusive; its eroticism is merely hinted at. I like this caddish look, which has been sexualized by the tifosi of Fassbinder’s phantasmagorias just as much as by crude hairdressers with sensuous pouts.

Politics of Incompleteness

I set out the shiny dress shoes for evenings alongside the less glamorous boots serving as my day-to-day pair for inspection. The contrast amounts to a new iteration of the old class struggle. Then I yank all my pairs of footwear out of the drawer and, embarking on a thorough uncoupling, take each left shoe and recouple it with another pair’s right shoe. Before long, the floor’s strewn with a mongrel horde in which all established patterns have been broken. These mismatched couples give my full assortment of shoes the allure of a newborn democracy.

Thin Lace

An eagle-eyed inspection of my shoes reveals that several pairs no longer have their original laces. But who would notice that this black lace isn’t exactly the right fit, that the brown lace is slightly lighter on 1 side, slightly darker on the other? My footwear is no longer pristine—the system’s been infiltrated by replacement laces.

Delayed Tassel Loafers

I used to always feel contemptuous of those conceited schoolchildren parading around in their tassel loafers, the most bourgeois of shoes, but now, as I’ve finally come to appreciate their utter simplicity, I can’t be sure I wasn’t misjudging this footwear’s social status all along. The sheer respectability Dewar & Gicquel brought them by sculpting them in 150 cm × 140 cm × 180 cm marble has made it that much harder for me to sneer at them.

Heraclitean Shoes

Authors’ shoes always hint at their overinflated egos: I guess I should complain that this brown size 11 makes my foot too long, a morphological detail that’s only done me harm, since it keeps tripping me up, and all this even though I measured my foot 7 times. Heraclitus insisted the sun was the width of 1 human foot … and, in fact, if I pick up the shoe that was lying on the floor and hold it up to the window, it does seem that I can blot the sun out completely … and so savor culture’s majestic humiliation of nature!

Foucault Clarks

As for my other nonblack pair, which are dark-brown calfskin Clarks, I don’t wear them anymore. Their style, paralleling my espadrilles and Spring Courts, rounds out a sentimental ’60s-era triptych. I’ll omit them from my chronicle, showing them some unearned respect (respect is just a simulacrum of love), rather than submit them to any inclemency here. After all, they can be worn only in dry weather, which we rarely get at Parisian latitudes, so I just keep them out of life’s warpath entirely … and Michel Foucault’s haunting line, “Those I love, I use,” pops out of the drawer like a jack-in-(or out-of-)the-box.

Ingress & Egress

We talk about ingress and egress when we consider the layout of rooms. Books and furniture hardly ever leave, whereas clothes breach the inside/outside interface. And so they come back filled with both wisdom and folly: my boots have learned to make quick getaways; my suits have suffered sarcasm and envy; my navy sweater has breathed the air of urban thoroughfares; my blazer has shielded me from inevitable passersby in the city; my hat has allowed me to play the gentleman out in the countryside; my fitted coat has survived 3 breakups and accompanied me back home every time.

Failing to Give Up the Ghost

The longer I think about my clothes, the more I see what a ghost I am. I’ve made my clothes my allies because we have so few allies, yet these aliens have only alienated my spirit. On the assumption that I’d become more individualistic through their intervention, the converse has obtained: they’ve forced me beyond the welter of possibilities they offer into a sort of impersonality, the distance growing more and more terrible as I, too, become terrible. By multiplying my provisional incarnations, they reveal my essential emptiness. I hear Édith Piaf’s plea to a ragman to dredge up her lost heart among so many old clothes reverberate in my head full of dust and references, and I realize that the only outfit I absolutely can’t bear to wear is that of a writer—which is, alas, my own skin.

Brands down the Toilet

Agnès b., A.P.C., H&M, José Lévy, Lacoste, Monoprix, Uniqlo: they’ll end up going down the toilet, all the furniture to the flea markets, all the books to used bookstores.

Vanitas Vanitatum

I now have more shoes than space for them in my armoire: I have to leave 2 pairs out. What should be hidden, no longer is. Everything’s overflowing; I push the drawer in with my foot and shut the armoire.

Slowly Shut

Drawing the 2 curtains together very slowly, I hasten the downfall of all that is novelistic.

3rd Tam Tam (White)

Set in front of the closed armoire, my 3rd Tam Tam stool is waiting for its moment in the spotlight. This white 1, identical to its red and black brothers, serves as footboard or pedestal for waxing shoes. Due to a manufacturing error that I didn’t notice immediately, its 2 components don’t fit together well, and it’s impossible to use without these elements coming apart. I’ll get rid of it as soon as I can.

Ruinous Parvenu

As I come to the end of this survey, I’m seized by a brutal disgust in front of the inert mass of all these things to which I’ve tried to give some life and light. I’m beginning to want to see the ruination of everything here, even the building around me; what I feel is the relic of some respect I once held for the past. A respect that’s only grown more and more absurd as mediocrity and dilapidation have taken root in this space. There’s something vile about living in old things that are nonetheless devoid of history.

A Real Estate Expert’s Visit After the Next Crash

“Monsieur, your 50 m2 apartment has tripled in value since you bought it on September 11, 2001.”

“And I can provide a complete inventory!”

Assailing Surroundings

It’s taken me such a long time to make my way around my apartment! But 3 years is 3 times less than Ulysses took returning from Troy. Ulysses didn’t want to get home, and I, assailed by the prospect of heading out, I plead not to have to leave.

Blocus Solus

Not leaving my apartment for all these years, staying caged like a rat, cloistered, was my homage to all those other shut-ins I could name, for whom leaving home amounted to an impossible feat. Unable to poke their noses outside, this outside that threatened to crush them, they whiled away their days, unable to lose themselves even in decorating, painstakingly, the voids they called their homes.

Scorning the Light

My bedroom lights should be turned off. Near me is the room’s 2nd light source, a vertical 1.80-m-high Ikea floor lamp that can be put wherever the shadows of a poorly lit room congregate. Along with the HP printer (← OFFICE), it’s 1 of my place’s numerous poorly made knockoffs, and, indeed, I scorn this lamp as much as I hate my printer. Really, though, it’s my own weakness that I scorn, since I’ve never managed to get rid of the thing. It belongs (belonged) to the previous owner of this apartment, and before that must have come from some junkyard, with its long crooked pole that isn’t properly screwed in, its white plastic shade with its circle of dust, its gray base filthy with stains, and its twisted black cord like a crummy theater prop—none of which, clearly, has kept it from becoming a star on stages all around the world: through the window, I can see its replica in my neighbor’s apartment. Only the optimal angle of its illumination saves it from being chucked onto the sidewalk. When I move out of my place, I’ll leave this floor lamp for my successor, repaying the favor my seller believed she was doing me. As I make my way beneath its 100 watts toward less notional realities, I see myself in a harsh light; this entity illuminates another (and another and another and another). What it highlights is that my apartment doesn’t completely belong to me, nor I to it.

Packing My Bags

I pick up the Oriental silk screen protecting my card table, and the table itself, its 4 legs folding neatly under its top. The volume it delineated merges into the rest of the apartment’s volume.

Camera Obscura

I hit the floor lamp’s button, then flick the wall switch. The curtains are drawn. The room is dark, though the living room projects a hint of luminescence. I listen to the space’s inhabited silence, and then its 1,000 small noises, among which are those I make myself. I wait for something to happen.

The Doorbell Rings!

I enter the living room, glancing conscientiously at the corners. Did I make a mistake, earlier, not answering? Pale light streams in from the courtyard. On the dining table, white sheets are stacked high. I take my pen, I sit down, read the final page, add some words.

The World as Will and Idea

And, penning these lines, I realize for the 1st time that when I die I don’t know who will inherit this world I call an apartment. I have no idea whether this text might have any legal weight; just in case, I might as well use this opportunity to name my heirs and assigns: I hereby bequeath my apartment, in the event of my death, to the person to whom I dedicated this book.

Doorbell

The doorbell rings. I go. Peephole. Nobody. I grab my keys. I open the door. The 3rd-floor hallway. Empty. A glance. The stairwell. “Anybody there?” I can’t have been dreaming. I go up some steps. I go back down. I’m in front of my open door.