Home Body

Most of us are fortunate enough to live in a house. Most houses have the same things in them: beds, bathtubs, closets, floors, stairs, windows, kitchen sinks. Most of these things, especially utilitarian objects like walls, floors, windows and ceilings, are so common as to hardly garner any attention whatsoever unless they are falling into disrepair. We see them all the time when indoors, but their presence hardly registers on our consciousness (babies, for example, stare at the ceiling a good deal of the time, but the word "ceiling" is hardly important enough to us-as is the ceiling itself-to teach it to them first). Mr. Thorne isn't convinced that these mundane objects are as mundane as we may collectively think they are. Through a series of short chapters that cover the gamut of things in and of a typical house--The Keyhole, The Floor, The Bed, the Closet-- he puts the typical dwelling under the microscope and takes another look at the things we all LOOK at, but don't really SEE.It's a fascinating exploration of the everyday, seen through a different lens than the one we normally use to view our world. I, for one, haven't thought about the shape of the bathtub since childhood. But, after reading Home Body, I now look at it differently, much the way I did when I was a child. Back then (as Mr. Thorne reminded me), the tub resembled some sort of reverse boat-where the curved sides, like a hull, held the water IN, instead of keeping it OUT. The further irony of floating a toy boat on the water inside this bathtub-boat is something I've not thought about in years, having used the bathtub for it's purpose of getting clean in recent history.While not written from a childlike perspective, Home Body does have a lilting, poetical, imaginative turn of phrase for even the most mundane objects in the home. For example, dust: "Dust, like madness, blindness, moral decay, doesn't appear out of the blue with the sudden violence of a summer storm. It drifts down softly, an incessant, imperceptible sift."Indeed.

John Thorne has an awe-inspiring ability to show us that the everyday, the normal, the nominal are worth more thought. More than simply where we live, the house--in Thorne's able hands-- becomes the living, breathing, secret-bearing thing we'd be hard put to live without. He pokes around in all the corners, examining not only doors and windows and mirrors, but tables, chairs, and bathtubs. You'll wander through your home with this book in hand, eyes widening as you realize he's right. This is a lovely look at the things we ignore simply because they're always there. Open your eyes and look again.