On “a pensive lustre”

One, or perhaps the main, reason for moving further east and south was the lure/dream of better weather. Of summers with actual sunshine for more than a paltry few days. Of long evenings enjoying vin rosé; of breathing in the scents of jasmine and lavender; of drifting off to the soothing drone of the bees in the flower-laden linden trees; of a gentle pootle in the pool after work. Of… many things. Well, this year not so much. For we have just had a week of spectacular thunderstorms. Which followed many weeks of on-again, off-again rain. Wet rain. The whole place is thoroughly sodden. Though thankfully we have not been inundated, unlike some of our less fortunate friends. At least the frogs are happy. And perhaps the lonely mallard.

Venturing out/lazing about curtailed, I have been enjoying In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki. In this reassuringly rambling essay, he laments the loss of the traditional aesthetics of Japanese architecture to the brash brightness of modern Western building styles, among other things. He prefers “a pensive lustre to a shallow brilliance.” I too am fond of dimly lit rooms, especially in the evening. Overly bright rooms at night make me feel on edge, drained of colour and vivacity. Old. Almost the first thing we did when we moved in was to change all the bulbs for ones with fewer lumens and a warmer temperature. Or even removed them entirely. The chandelier in the hall had 8 bulbs in it, all of them 60 watt or equivalent. It hurt to turn it on, the hall ablaze with cold hard white light. Himself was amazed that it hadn’t actually gone up in a blaze, given that it was overloaded.

But lowering the lights can go too far. A London restaurant comes to mind. It was so dimly lit that it was a wonder that our host made it up the stairs to the dining room without falling flat on his face, given that the steps were narrow and shallow, covered in a thick, dark plush carpet and he sported probably the longest, pointiest shoes ever made. The dining room was no brighter. I could barely make out the menu. It was difficult to tell what was edible and what merely decoration. It was all rather stressful. A little more light would have made the experience more pleasurable and have still created a restful, intimate ambiance. We went there only once.

We are perhaps too dimly lit at present. Finding lamps of an appropriate scale without breaking the bank is proving a bit of a challenge. In the meantime I am making good use of candles. Stearin ones of course. And enjoying the play of light across our newly painted walls. Though it is a little depressing to have to turn on the lights during the day. In June. Here, at least, the skies while grey are high. Unlike in Ireland, where the grey is, more often than not, louring. And the light has a peculiar quality to it, creating a glare that is quite exhausting, making the wearing of sunglasses essential. But then you can barely see. It can get you down.

A Belgian friend asked me if the Irish are a melancholy race. I am prone to a touch of melancholy and of course many of our old songs are melancholy or have a melancholy air.  The old tales seemed to me never to end happily. And then we were a subject nation for hundreds of years. So perhaps we do have a bit of gloom about us. But then I opened Romantic Irish Homes by Robert O’Byrne and was struck by how brightly colourful Irish houses are. Colour to lift the grey and warm up the cold. Colour to raise the spirits. Yellow seems to be a particular favourite. And red. Have a look at interior designer Róisín Lafferty’s contemporary use of colour.

“…love the colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them. Living in these old houses among these old objects is in some mysterious way a source of peace and repose.”

– Junichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

Bright colours seem not to work in this house. It prefers dirty, cloudy colours. It does not want anything too shiny or too smooth, too perfect or too new, or at least for these to be kept to a minimum. Nor does it want too many things. It is happiest when the rooms have space to breathe. I am learning to “…find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against the other creates.” While wearing a hot pink dress.

A bientôt