My dear friends,
At thirty-seven days to the end of the year, one's perspective begins to change precipitously. I remind myself of those lines of Mr. Emerson I have so often revisited: "We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life." That is the hope in which I live.
Last week Jeff Klee finished our plans (below) to the extent necessary to specify our timbers. To me, those plans are as beautiful and invigorating as sea air blowing off the Chesapeake and running up-river on the open James. Certainly they are as "neat and plain" as a frame can be, to employ the phrase of the time. But in their modest austerity, I see the new spirit of a new land, poised between one world and the next, struggling to be born.
The impermanent "Virginia House" was the spontaneous expression of a new relationship to life. Compared with Old World precedent and early European structures on this continent, it rested lightly on the land, as if nothing were certain in this new world where materials were abundant but skills scarce, and much had to be made of little as a matter of necessity. It was, in that way, as much akin in spirit to the lightly-built domestic structures of the Powhatan Indians as it was to more permanent English structures. The humble Virginia House would develop over the course of a century as a bridge between settler and native, black and white, enslaved and free. It was a new thing, an American thing.
This afternoon I visited David Stemann of Stemann Pease, our architects. David saw me from his upstairs window and graciously came down to meet me in the hall. In the space of five minutes we had agreed upon our next steps, which I then bore away to Garland Wood, our master builder. With his imperturbable good cheer, Garland made light of the quite terrible constraints now pressing upon his work, as if he were a true initiate into the mysteries of Emerson's sense of time. Garland then spoke to David about rough and finished dimensions, about what could be circular-sawn and what must be band-sawn, and we concluded the day a few steps closer to home.
This past week we also opened our class at William & Mary on "The American Wisdom Tradition." We have a couple of hundred adult students enrolled for the series so far, and I was amazed at the response to our first meeting. Even among those few who had occasion to identify their profession, there were university professors, lawyers, an artist, a physician, a country parson, and an international court judge. I shall never again despair of an American indifference to wisdom.
The relationship between our two projects, the American Wisdom Project at William & Mary and the Virginia House Project at Colonial Williamsburg, is as intimate as that between the natural mind and the spiritual body. They represent between them the first link to separate in the broken chain of human history of which we suffer today. If we could somehow repair just that one link, then we should truly justify all our efforts and prove a living "link among the days."
Yours always,
Michael
The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.
IMAGES
Jeffrey Klee: Virginia House Isometric 1
Jeffrey Klee: Virginia House Isometric 3
Jeffrey Klee: Virginia House Isometric 2