“The truth is, we don’t want things at all,” he replied. “The thought of a house and furniture of my own is hateful to me.”
This startled her for a moment. Then she replied:
“So it is to me. But one must live somewhere.”
“Not somewhere—anywhere,” he said. “One should just live anywhere—not have a definite place. I don’t want a definite place. As soon as you get a room, and it is complete, you want to run from it. Now my rooms at the Mill are quite complete, I want them at the bottom of the sea. It is a horrible tyranny of a fixed milieu, where each piece of furniture is a commandment-stone.”
She clung to his arm as they walked away from the market.
“But what are we going to do?” she said. “We must live somehow. And I do want some beauty in my surroundings. I want a sort of natural grandeur even, splendour.”
“You’ll never get it in houses and furniture—or even clothes. Houses and furniture and clothes, they are all terms of an old base world, a detestable society of man. And if you have a Tudor house and old, beautiful furniture, it is only the past perpetuated on top of you, horrible. And if you have a perfect modern house done for you by Poiret, it is something else perpetuated on top of you. It is all horrible. It is all possessions, possessions, bullying you and turning you into a generalisation. You have to be like Rodin, Michelangelo, and leave a piece of raw rock unfinished to your figure. You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside.”
She stood in the street contemplating.
“And we are never to have a complete place of our own—never a home?” she said.
“Pray God, in this world, no,” he answered.