Apartment qua Life.

Quandary:
My thought-life, when not otherwise engaged by concrete obligation, has as its predominant proclivity speculating on how best to furnish and design my apartment, which presently is just barely bare. Yet, though my proverbial wallet has begun to garner mass where it used to gather moss (while my literal wallet, you'll be happy to read, is now looking quite slim, having shed most of its unnecessary contraband), I nevertheless lack the funds to realize any of my decorative reveries. In short, I lack the money to buy all the necessary strips of fabric and sticks of wood necessary to make my apartment a thing of beauty. I pine, I perish.

So, as things go, I scour the internet for textiles, furniture, dinnerware, etc., bookmarking pages upon pages of inventive and beautiful wares, all aloof in their expense, sequestered from me by implausible expenditure.

Yet I have enough coin to get me a bit of play here and there. A new addition to my beloved property each month, maybe each paycheck. But this husbanding, "inch by inch, it's a cinch!" procedure cultivates in me a sense of apprehensive mystery. Disquiet at the unknown.

To explain: if I were to buy, say, a few bowls adorned with peacock colors/patterns, or a yellow-paisley tablecloth, or a butter dish fashioned in the shape of a whale, I would thereby preclude certain possible creative decisions per my dining room or as regards my kitchen supplies, by virtue my fastidious desire to strike an artistic coherence amongst each set of items I might own or within each area of experience my apartment has to offer. And this cutting off of legitimate, good, exciting living possibilities is disturbing. If I buy the Louis XIV cream bed frame, there is no way I can also get the bistre 1930's armoire.

Thinking of this, I think that this problem with my apartment might be a microcosm of a problem in life: that of making small decisions that appear fine up close and isolated, but which radically fashion your possible future. The problem of doing some one thing with the narrative of your existence, forsaking countless other possibly fulfilling, worthwhile things. The problem of the permanence that comes with writing in pen in the margin of a precious hardback volume of Saki.

Thinking of this, I think that just as the problem of my apartment might be a microcosm of bigger problems in life, I wonder whether my apartment itself is not a microcosm (or macrocosm?) of my very self.

Which of course reminds me of the beginning of Saki's The Unbearable Bassington:

Francesca herself, if pressed in an unguarded moment to describe her soul, would probably have described her drawing-room. Not that she would have considered that the one had stamped the impress of its character on the other, so that close scrutiny might reveal its outstanding features, and even suggest its hidden places, but because she might have dimly recognised that her drawing-room was her soul.