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Dwelling in Possibility

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Howard Mansfield

September 2013

Lydia Pyne

It’s hard to imagine a trope of Americana more ingrained in the public conscientiousness than purposeful living in New England. In Dwelling in Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter, Howard Mansfield takes Thoreau’s call to “live deliberately” as a demand to examine the nature of shelter and the circumstances that create a home. These themes, he argues, are how people can engage with their culture and how they live in their spaces. Dwelling in Possibility, one could say, is Mansfield’s answer to “putting to rout all that is not life” (Walden-Pond-style) by calling direct and specific attention to what he sees as humanity’s un-purposeful living in their dwellings.

It’s hard to imagine a trope of Americana more ingrained in the public conscientiousness than purposeful living in New England. In Dwelling in Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter, Howard Mansfield takes Thoreau’s call to “live deliberately” as a demand to examine the nature of shelter and the circumstances that create a home. These themes, he argues, are how people can engage with their culture and how they live in their spaces. Dwelling in Possibility, one could say, is Mansfield’s answer to “putting to rout all that is not life” (Walden-Pond-style) by calling direct and specific attention to what he sees as humanity’s un-purposeful living in their dwellings.

The compilation of profiles offers the reader sketches of different living situations. These range from commentaries about Hurricane Katrina—where inhabitants lost and repurposed dwelling space—to New England ice storms, where people live without the comforts of modernity. Mansfield’s sketches ask the reader to consider: What is purposeful dwelling, and thus, by proxy, living? How does modern American society achieve that within a connected, cluttered, cultural context? And how does our cultural humanity reflect in how we live? To answer this, we see Mansfield sketch the evolution of a fire hearth, the presence of FEMA in natural disasters, and the ironic state of what he calls a “Wi-Fi refugee” in post-disaster scenarios.

When I read the introduction, “House Hunting,” I had to laugh out loud. Last month, I became a first-time home buyer and the description of frustration and desperation that surrounded Mansfield’s own experience rang all too true. There’s a certain shared emotion, a sort of pan-domicile-owner feeling if you will, that Mansfield’s wry, deadpan humor completely nails.

However, the book feels scattered and uncurated. It’s as if we’re in an attic where everything is a complete hodge-podge. We see the book flit from topic to topic (and writing style to writing style) in ways that are difficult to follow. The questions and themes that underlie the topics can be difficult to pry out of the poetry, the journal entries, lists of observations, and the assorted stories. Snippets of philosophy and cultural criticism are sprinkled throughout the manuscript but are used to merely justify some kind of claim rather than as a means to explore a theme. We feel a departure from the invitation to purposeful living imbued in Thoreau’s Walden Pond, as Dwelling in Possibility feels sentimental, conveniently nostalgic, and irritatingly moralizing. Also, the book’s acrimonious anti-modernism does not appear to be a reflective conclusion of purposeful living—rather, Dwelling appears to pine for cabins long past, preaching a historical narrative completely constructed.

The questions that are scattered throughout Dwelling in Possibility are certainly ones that ought to be asked. How we live and make sense of how we live are, undoubtedly, anthropological underpinnings within modern culture. Despite the book’s lack of structure, Howard Mansfield’s clear commitment to his own New England living shows that he considers these questions worth pursuing—it would seem that he, at least, has found the means to dwell purposefully.

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