On keeping a quiet room

There is a kind of room that most houses used to have and most apartments no longer do: a room with nothing in it that needs you. No screen, no inbox, no small red number. A chair, a window, a lamp. You go there to sit with a thought until it either grows up or leaves.

This site is my attempt at building that room online, which is a slightly absurd thing to try, because the internet is by design the opposite of a quiet room. It is a hallway with every door open. Everything you put in it is immediately adjacent to everything else.

But a personal website is still a strange, stubborn little exception. Nobody is ranking it. Nothing is recommended. There is no one to perform for except the version of yourself who will read this in a year and wince, or not.

What goes here

Three kinds of thing, roughly:

1. Essays, which are the pieces I actually work on. They take weeks. They have a thesis, or they at least pretend to.
2. Poems, which take either ten minutes or ten years and I can never tell which in advance.
3. Blog posts, which are everything else — notes, half-thoughts, things I want to remember, things I want to be able to link to.

I’m not going to promise a schedule. A quiet room doesn’t have a schedule. You just go in when you need it.

Why bother

Because the alternative is that all of it lives in a notes app, or in the drafts folder of a platform that will change its rules next quarter. Because a URL you own is one of the few durable things you can make. And because — honestly — I like the idea of a place that is only mine, where the design is the way I want it and the only algorithm is a list sorted by date.

A house is a machine for living in.¹ A website is a machine for remembering.

That’s it. That’s the whole pitch. Sit down, the chair is comfortable.

Notes

1. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture (1923). He meant it as praise for efficiency; I mean the second half as praise for the opposite. ↩