A soft environment

On softness, "edge" and clarity

Photo by Meg MacDonald on Unsplash

The nicest story I’ve heard about my house came from a woman who dropped by during the pandemic.

We walked around the garden and she told me about growing up in the next village in the 1940s and 50s, and about the time she had spent here in those years, when this house had belonged to her grandparents. When she was little, she said, she’d come with her parents; but later, as a teenager, she would get on her bike and ride over on her own. It made me think that her grandparents must have been loved.

At the back of the garden, where it merges with the forest, she pointed out a sort of clearing between the trees. “That spot was mine, my very own piece of the garden,” she said. “I was allowed to plant anything I liked.”

The clearing was small, just right for a very little girl. I could hear the pride and happiness of it in her voice as she remembered how it was, 70 years later on.

It was a soft story. I think of it when I’m in that part of the garden, and I point it out to most of my guests. It makes me happy to think of grandparents making the space there to please a grandchild, to think of a child being happy and loved there, working away at her project, and now an adult with grandchildren of her own.

I have accumulated many stories of the house in the three years that I’ve lived here, but that one is my favorite, and it’s not without ground. Somewhere along the line, not quite consciously, I seem to have landed on the idea that the house should be filled with softness.

When I got out of the stupor and general down-ness of the pandemic, and looked at how I had furnished the place, which had been haphazardly, a mixture of hand-me-downs and bits and piece of my old things from storage, I realised that there was a kind of theme.

There are balls of yarn in baskets: I took up knitting, not because I wanted to knit, initially, but because I wanted to have soft yarn in soft colours in my house. There are plants, and blankets on the backs of chairs and of the sofa.

Almost all of the art is of something from a natural world: an impress of leaves on blue paper by a visiting photographer; a landscape of Skåne’s open fields; an image of the sea painted by a neighbour; an apple; and so on in all of the different spaces of the house. It’s almost absurd, how soft I made the space here, without consciously intending it.

It seems to feel that way to others, too. When people come in for the first time they visibly relax, and say words like “pleasant” and “calm” and “it feels good here.”

There is a complete absence of edge.

For a while it worried me, that I had somehow become someone who wanted to live in a space with a complete absence of edge. I felt like someone who wanted hot chocolate with whipped cream when everyone else was drinking good wine, as if I was not fully grown up. As if I had lost something adult in myself that should want more than just softness.

I eventually noticed too, though no one else seemed to, that I had essentially furnished the house in Modified Hippie. When I confided this to friends, they looked surprised and denied it, and I realized that it’s partly because it’s subtle, and partly because I’m in a foreign country and objects don’t always code the same way to me as they do to people who are better grounded in the cultural connotations they carry.

The couch pillow and the lampshade with stylised flowers, for instance, are famous Swedish designs from the 1950s; they speak classic culture, not hippie, to most people here. But any other former hippie, seeing them in the context of the rest of the house, all the other flowers and so forth, would interpret them precisely as I suddenly saw them, to my dismay.

But why was it worrisome to realize that I had created a kind of hippie-like (if cleaner) world with no edge to it? I’ve lived in cultural centers, I’ve lived where artists were trying to break free from things, surely it was all right to no longer want to be on the edge in that sense? And still I was bothered, concerned.

Oddly enough, it was an essay, or rather an interview, that made things make more sense to me.

The interview is with an artist in the Orkney Islands in Scotland who writes and paints on themes on water. The first time I saw one of the artist’s Substack articles, very randomly — it must have been recommended by one of the bookish Substacks I started with — I felt that I had landed in a soft place: so much beauty in the images.

But in the interview, which showed more of the art and the process and the thinking, I understood: the work isn’t edgy, which I feel almost allergic to these days, but it’s not, in fact, soft, either. Instead it’s got a kind of clarity, a kind of intellectual and artistic rigourousness.

I had been thinking that the choices were between softness and edge, and I knew that I didn’t want edge, and yet felt that I was giving up on something important.

But the interview reminded me that intellectual and artistic rigorousness, unlike edge, can coexist with the kind of softness that I seem to be needing just now. Clarity and intellectual rigor can coexist with beauty, can be grounded and present and real, and also coexist with softness without being necessarily soft itself. ¹²

When I left the academic world and took up life in the country, I think that I somehow thought that I had to choose between softness and everything else. It’s nice to revisit that, to think: softness does not have to preclude clarity of thought or presence, and clarity of thought and presence can be strong, and either energetic or calm as the case may be, without a need for edge.

It’s a good thought, and, oddly enough, it brings one back to the guest whose grandparents made her a space of her own in their garden. It’s a soft story, but it’s also a clear and strong one: they gave a place to learn how to garden, to do it well. It’s got softness and strength in equal measure, and no edge at all, in the sense that I have been meaning it.

1. Perhaps it was the hippie echoes that had tripped me up. The hippie era as I experienced it had a deep lack of intellectual and artistic rigorousness, and in going for soft I seemed to myself to have ended up going for echoes of that era, and that seemed to be an abdication from something essential and adult.

2. If you haven’t clicked yet on one of the links above, which lead to Samantha Clark’s beautiful essays and images on Substack, here they are again:

— the BBC interview (which includes a transcript and images)

— The Life Boat