To leave his house

I was put off not far from the foot of a lake. From there, I walked into the woods in the area outside Boston and found The Walden Track, named after American writer Henry David Thoreau's account Walden. Life in the forests. I had read about his life, his civil disobedience, his breakup from protected civilian life in and around Boston. But Thoreau's life was not just the story of the break with a civil way of life. It was also a life experiment that made up our ideas about the home and what it means to live. The story begins with a man leaving the city in favor of the forest. He cuts down pine trees and builds a house. When the house is finished he opens the lumber door to take a walk through the forest as he has done many times before, but on this day he does not return. He builds a house and then leaves it. He leaves the house behind, as if he has no sense of ownership, as if leaving is more important than staying. The elements – the tree and the light – were allowed to stand out, but it was the movement between the elements that caught most of the attention. This house renounced its builder. Back then stood a place of changing tenants.

A cage near the birds. In his book Life in the forests Thoreau writes about the necessity of giving himself a series of exercises: fishing, preparing a meal, studying the terrain, learning animal sounds, reading, collecting firewood, gaining insight into the rhythm of light. "We are the subject of an experiment," he writes. The purpose of the exercises is to get away from actions and their short-term consequences. Later, I do not find it surprising that Thoreau was hated by the bourgeoisie and certain powerful individuals in the local Massachusetts municipal council because his experiment removed the territorial boundaries between work and leisure, between solitude and company, between wealth and poverty, between ownership and free use, between individualism and collectivism.

I found the sign that tells of the way to his cabin through deciduous trees and the heavy carpet of autumn leaves, and reached the house that remotely resembles nothing more than a large wooden shed. A few meters away I passed the bronze statue of the man who was already on his way. I went inside and placed myself in the middle of the "living room". A crooked floor, an oblong window and ceiling for tipping. Here was not much to begin with, I had an experience that the architect had almost withdrawn. As if his thoughts on the house consist of layers folded over one another, twisted in a band of light, the age and veins of the tree, and the arrival of a human, something that strides in several directions. The frame of the house was only a deposit in the woods for a meeting – Thoreau writes in Life in the forests: «This flimsy frame had just crystallized around me, and it worked back on the builder. There was something of the same mood saturation over its lines as over a painting. I didn't have to go outside to breathe fresh air, because the atmosphere in there had lost none of its freshness. Even when it rained the most I didn't sit so much in front of doors as just behind a door. Harivansa says: A dwelling without birds is like unspoiled meat. That was not my place, for I had suddenly become a neighbor to the birds; not by holding them captive, but by placing my own cage near them. ”

The sanctuary of the house has become a symbol of our depoliticized era.

To leave his house. The question that kept me occupied was: Why build a house to leave it later? Thoreau's simple house expresses a gigantic ambition that, like architecture, is doomed to failure. It was this peculiar project that propelled me to follow in the footsteps of this writer who has often been misunderstood as a natural romantic philosopher. Because maybe he ushered in a whole new kind of architecture? An architecture that breaks with the notion of the need to own one's home, of housing as the end-of-life station? Where living and living is associated with being able to leave, leaving things behind. Thoreau's compatriot, poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his moral speeches that "it is not possible to receive unless one can leave". You cannot open yourself to the different new if you live in eternal fear of losing what you have built. A setting that contrasts with a lot of politics today that is about not being able to leave your house: the security, the recognizability, the security. Huset has wintered not only as the private place, but as the place where we must realize the highest human possibilities, that which in ancient times was reserved for public life. The sanctuary of the house has become a symbol of our depoliticized era. As never before, public space has invaded what previously belonged to the private household, but without that we have created a life of greater political and ethical awareness. It is still the house and not being able to leave its house that forms the framework for public welfare and politics. Modern politics resembles a framework for private life, a life without risk, a life that never leaves its house. Today, staying in his house is like an expulsion of all the unpleasantness we do not want to be. For Thoreau and Emerson, being able to leave his house is the opposite of an escape. Leaving is an exercise in being receptive, being able to work around one's desires and needs in ways that are not organized according to the house's fixed framework. In this simple gesture of leaving his house, we may encounter today's most anti-capitalist practice: plant a seed, pass it on to others and continue on your path. Not to find a new identity, not to be specific. But keep going, relieved by the pleasure of not being able to locate. The ease of being able to move in multiple directions at once, experimenting without having to locate, without having to show passports.

The landscape resides in the house. When the house was finished Thoreau spent time listening to owls and birds, fishing and hiking. Inside he described what was outside, he was writing. Every day he walked out the door to go for a walk. But the house he returned to after several days of walking was no longer the same. The experiment was a feat that makes the home a living art, the movement as an organic thought: To live, one must leave and leave the bed to others. To build a house, as Thoreau writes, "you need a little Yankee cunning if you don't want to end up in a work facility, an impassable maze, a museum, a farm, a prison or a magnificent mausoleum." The secret is to make it clear how simple a shelter is needed. With this ingenuity, Thoreau sought to abolish the usual boundaries of the territory of the house. The lightweight materials and the airy cabin should also accommodate a traveler in the middle of his orbit and as such be the place where a goddess might have let her tow sweep across the floor, as he notices. Thoreau brought the landscape within. A vision, a plain, the power of the tree, the lines of the horizon, the thought you bring with you when you sit in a chair. Like the child who occupies his room only to dream. Who does not live to possess. Who throws the toy away when it's done playing, and who finds something new afterwards. A place where the art of building is not about fencing, but making another life possible. Thoreau's construction resembled a variant of the child's dreamy relationship with one's own room: one does not build to possess, but to nourish the imagination. Not only a human, but also a landscape lives in the house. I understood that Thoreau had great admiration for the old nomads, for those moving from pasture to pasture. The Jews, Muslims or Hindus come from ancient cultures that reject humanity's ability to claim ownership of the land. With his poetic-architectural experiment, Thoreau asked questions about the permanent way of life, the demand for possession. Could one create an architecture that reminds man that it has no need to possess the earth? Walden tells of a life without possession, without possession to things, to animals, to language, to the land.

To become another. As he lives in this house for a year, he closes the door behind him, Thoreau moves with the same easy step down the path he has walked each morning. He spent a whole year building and planning this house, after which, as the most natural in the world, he takes off his coat and walks. Out in the world, away from the house, away from himself. Everything seems to suggest that Thoreau has been thinking from the start: I build a house out here to keep warm and be dry when it rains, but first and foremost I build a house to become another. Why, as an architect, should I build a house if it wasn't to change me? Just as you can say about a painter, why should he paint if it wasn't for change? Or about a writer, why should he write if it wasn't for becoming someone else? For Thoreau, the house was the beginning of a movement. Leaving his house is not the same as losing himself. He who does not shake off his grief takes his snail's house wherever he goes. Whoever can leave what he has created,
leaving it behind can start again somewhere else. He did not build his house to get away from others, but to leave what he knew. As an athletic pole vault, he placed his pills in the ground only to get better at jumping. To leave without a nag. Without grief. Leave what we have built, be it a house, a sand castle, a poem.

Leaving their house is perhaps the most anti-capitalist of actions: plant a seed, pass it on and continue on your path.

"I had moved so far out into the great ocean of loneliness that all the rivers of sociality poured out that only the finest sediments settled around me. In addition, driving life signs came to me from unexplored and unexplored continents on the other side. ”

To live, Thoreau needed to get lost. To live, he needed the forest echo of sorrowful answers, degrading spirits and fallen souls. To live, he needed the framing of an unknown scene.