When I had to choose a title for these cons that I have been writing for the ARA newspaper for years, I took the title of my favorite novel by one of my favorite authors: The city and the house, by Natalia Ginzburg. I took the liberty of using it by reversing the order of the concepts: The house and the city. In this way, the title was more in line with the characteristics of my writing: to write –whether fiction or non-fiction– I am more interested in the private sphere (the house), everything that has to do with lived experiences, personal ties, emotions. Then I am interested in the collective sphere (the city), everything that has to do with shared struggles, politics, social customs.
The house, then, has been a mania of mine for many years. And now, thanks to a book I have read, I have the intellectual arguments to justify it. Siruela Ensayo has published Philosophy of the house, Domestic space and happiness,
This Italian author begins by acknowledging that philosophy, for centuries, has forgotten the domestic sphere, dragged along by the male interest in shining in society and having power and influence in the city. But, in Coccia's opinion, this forgetfulness has meant as much as making happiness unthinkable. Because the house is, in reality, our attempt to accommodate the portion of the world – things, people, places, images, events – that make our happiness possible.
All animals have this instinct: to make a nest, to look for a cave to take refuge in. Home means comfort, calm, a place to return to. That is why I like this fashion of saying that this place or that person "is home." A very simple way of saying many things, true economy of language.
One of the reflections that has most caught my attention Philosophy of the house It is this process of transformation that we are experiencing with social networks. The houses, which until now were the private/sacred place, are now the sets where the influencers are offered to the world. They share their home with everyone and, therefore, the home is no longer synonymous with privacy. Coccia explains that social networks are a kind of collective novel in which everyone is at the same time an author, a reader and a character. Reality and fiction are no longer opposed. influencers They create reality so that they can live in it.
Returning to Coccia's book: another reason that the author has given me to understand the seduction that the house exerts on me is that houses are almost living beings. A house –says Coccia– is never finished, we never stop building it. You could say that we are domesticating it (like the Little Prince does with the fox: "If you domesticate me we will need each other, for me you will be unique in the world"). The house in which we live is unique in the world.
Everyone who lives in a house leaves a mark, that is why a house always allows us to decipher the dream of happiness of those who built it or chose to live in it before us.
The other day I told all this in the program The balcony, from Radio Barcelona. After a few days, an artist friend sent me the work he had painted after hearing me. The houses had connected us. I thought it was very nice.
