The Ministry of Fear (Conclusion)

      

I.       I.    

  

     To walk from Paddington to Battersea gives time for thought.  He knew what he had to do long before he began to climb the stairs.  A phrase of Johns came back to mind about a Ministry of Fear.  He felt now that he had joined its permanent staff.  But it wasn’t the small bureau to which Johns had referred, with limited aims like winning a war or changing a constitution.  It was a ministry as large as life to which all who loved belonged.  If one loved one feared.  

    II.

    The anxiety left her face:  all that remained was that tense air he had observed before – the air of someone perpetually on guard to shield him.  He sat down on the bed and put his hand on her shoulder.  "My dear,” he said, “my dear.  How much I love you.”   He was pledging both of them to a lifetime of lies, but only he knew that.  

     “Me too,” she said.  “Me too.”

     They sat for a long while without moving and without speaking:  they were on the edge of their ordeal like two explorers who see at last from the summit of the range the enormous dangerous plain.  They had to tread carefully for a lifetime, never speak without thinking twice:  they must watch each other like enemies because they loved each other so much.  They would never know what it was not to be afraid of being found out.  It occurred to him that perhaps after all one could atone even to the dead if one suffered for living enough.

     He tried tentatively a phrase.  “My dear, my dear, I am so happy,” and heard with infinite tenderness her prompt and guarded reply, “Me too.”  It seemed to him that after all one could exaggerate the value of happiness .  .  .

From:  Graham Greene, The Ministry Of Fear, London, William Heinemann, 1943.

Simeon Salomon Images:

Top:  Hypnos, The God Of Sleep

Bottom:  Death Awakening Sleep

Hypnos At Home (Nonverbal Communication)

Every interior betrays the nonverbal skills of its inhabitants.  The choice of materials, the distribution of space, the kind of objects that command attention or demand to be touched – as compared to those that intimidate or repel – have much to say about the preferred sensory modalities of their owners.

Their sense of organization, the degree of freedom left to imagination, their coerciveness or aesthetic rigidity, their sensitivity and fields of awareness – are all revealed in their houses.

Child psychiatrists use play techniques to observe children expressing their foremost concerns through creative activities.

Psychiatrists working with adults need only study the material environment with which individuals surround themselves to secure fresh insights into their relationships to objects, people and ideas.

The contrast between a meticulously kept mansion inhabited by an elderly couple and a small home filled with children, where marks of living are found everywhere, is one that needs no comment.

NOTE:   


The text above is excerpted from Jurgen Ruesch and Weldon Kees' Nonverbal Communication, Notes on the Visual Perception of Human Relations, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1956, where I've lately found my rootless self rooting around.

The extraordinary interior photographs above show the Belgian Symbolist artist Fernand Khnoppf's (now unfortunately destroyed) Villa Khnopff on the Avenue des Courses, near the Bois de la Cambre, in Brussels.  An article describing the house by Hélène Laillet, which was originally published in The Studio, LVII, December 1912, no. 237, p. 206 and The International Studio, XLVIII, January 1913, no. 191, p. 201, is found Here and is well worth reading.

Khnoppf' lived and worked alone in his meticulously kept mansion (the exterior appears above this note) without a companion or children.  It's my kind of house, actually, and reminds me of interiors that my mother would also have found appealing or designed for our type of family living.  I suppose it's not for everyone and it's a far cry from the space I inhabit now.

I personally have no design talent whatsoever; I can't make a room comfortable or practical, let alone add any flair or aesthetic savor to an interior space.  (My mother's considerable gifts in that regard were passed on to my brother, I think.)

But I wonder, in terms of Ruesch and Kees' analysis, if what we aspire to but do not create ourselves also conveys significant clues as to the nonverbal skills or qualities of the "imagining inhabitants."  I just don't know.

Apart from Khnoppf's masterpiece, I think my favorite interior ever was the standard junior suite accommodation formerly (I haven't been there in years, so I'm assuming there have been changes) offered by the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, California.  The suite was visually perfect in all respects -- straight and curved lines all in place, soothing and enlivening colors rightly arrayed and arranged, exquisite textures, order reigning.  The only problem was that if you moved around in the room at all, if you displaced a single item from its assigned position, you wrecked the place.  I occasionally had two or three week stays there and I was constantly cleaning my own room.  Those were the days (after a fashion).

Tempur-Pedic (2011: A Sleep Odyssey)

  
 

 

         The Tempur-Pedic system (mattress and pillow) is by far the most comfortable bedding I have ever lain awake on all night almost every night.  It makes sleeplessness a restful and infinitely fascinating place on the map, one I always look forward to (re)visiting.  This luxurious product is well well worth the expense.

        I believe that you could actually jump energetically on the Tempur-Pedic memory foam mattress and complete a round of calisthenics without upsetting a glass of red wine as they suggest in their commercials, but I'm not going to try.

    
        But, please, don't take my word for the benefits of Hypnos' and King Croesus' greatest gift to humanity.  

        Consult instead with our panel of sleep experts.

Eddie (l), Felix (r) evaluating

     "Pataphysics is the science." -- Alfred Jarry, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll Pataphysician.
 

 King Croesus on the pyre, Attic red-figure amphora, 500-490 BC, Louvre, Paris

Fernand Khnopff, Une aile bleue (A blue wing), 1894, Oil on canvas, Private collection

Painting includes Khnopff's Head of Hypnos, inspired by Scopas' 350 BC sculpture in the British Museum.  Khnopff made several versions of Hypnos, in both sculpture and painting, and included an altar to Hypnos in his Brussels studio.