What does the place I'm living in look like? Well, here's a taste, the post at the foot of the stairs. I count six different colors of paint, all of them eroded by the hands of people who lived here before any of us present residents arrived. I'd especially like to know who lived here when the stairs were painted yellow! Don't suppose I could find out even if I really wanted, though: the house has long been self-governing, and the landlord doesn't know or care who comes or goes so long as the rent is paid.House shares seem an institution in this part of Melbourne, only partly because of the proximity of the Uni. I went to a party last night a bit north of here - a sort of welcome party for two recently arrived housemates in a house of similar design - and nobody there had been a student in a while. Phil has lived there twenty years. David, the friend who took me along, knows Phil because his (David's) partner Karen first lived there when she came to Melbourne many years ago, moved out for research (she's a linguist) and moved back, several times! Another of the housemates is a chipper bushwalking pyschologist from Adelaide, a third a rather morose doctor in training (or maybe he was just drunk). Makes for a more interesting, diverse mix of people than everyone living in a place of their own, and socializing only with people they know from school or work.
It reminded me of discussions about Wohngemeinschften I've had with family and friends in Germany. My cousin Agnes in Berlin lived in big apartments shared among four or six or more people for many years (grand 19th century bourgeois apartments with many rooms but few facilities), and says she thinks them a great laboratory for learning to respect different kinds of people. Different WG are governed in different ways, but you're always getting to know/having to cope with new arrivals, new kinds of food in the fridge, and perhaps new kinds of music from next door. My friend Lisa in Göttingen, a political theorist, has actually written about WG as sites of democratic praxis!
In an interesting, gently Taoist performance piece for the Melbourne International Festival called "Objects for Meditation,"
the gay Chinese Australian photographer and monologist William Yang talked (among many other things) about why he likes coming home to his empty apartment in Sydney. "Not lonely, but empty: empty can be filled, while lonely implies longing." That's sort of been my experience living alone these past few years - one needs a room of one's own - but sharing a house with relative strangers (I haven't told you about them because I don't yet know much) is reacquainting me with the pleasures of another way of living which seems every bit as natural.As some of you may know, I'm working on a book on the good, and this is a nice way of discovering in reality something I've been persuaded of in theory for a while, that (as Aquinas argued) the greatest goods are intrinsically shared and shareable. It takes a bit of coordination about who showers when and you do have to clean up after yourself in the kitchen, but the very spaces you live in seem happier to participate in several lives - and to have participated in those of others who've moved on.
