The Great Good Places
In Search of Belonging Out of the House
Right after finishing my last letter to you with a lovely quote about how powerful a home can be and its “place” in our lives, I found another quote that immediately challenged that grace.
Read this:
The purchase of the even larger home on the even larger lot in the even more lifeless neighborhood is not so much a matter of joining community as retreating from it. Encouraged by a continuing decline in the civilities and amenities of the public or shared environment, people invest more hopes in their private acreage. They proceed as though a house can substitute for a community if only it is spacious enough, entertaining enough, comfortable enough, splendid enough -- and suitably isolated from that common horde that politicians still refer to as our ‘fellow Americans’ (Oldenburg, 1999, p. 7).
And right away this topic about place, and specifically “home,” is complicated.
Good Places
1888 Center
This quote comes from the book, The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg. This is the book that launched the idea of a “third place.” Essentially, we all have a first and second place, home and work, but the third place is where we go for community outside of those first two places.
In fact, while diving into this book, I came across this article in Fortune Magazine massively titled, “The CEO of a major co-working company says bosses need to create a ‘third place’ for employees if they want a meaningful office culture” that seemed to validate the unique energy and flavor that a third place adds to one’s life (and, as I wrote to you before, a misunderstanding between work and happiness, and more specifically, about making work “fun” and simply needing to restructure the work week as before.)
Reading through the book, I came across this quote that brought back a hilarious moment in my quest of finding my own places after restarting in DC:
To have such a place available whenever the demons of loneliness or boredom strike or when the pressures and frustrations of the day call for relaxation amid good company is a powerful resource (Oldenburg, 1999, p. 32).
Much of my sense of a third place is defined by one of my all-time short stories, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” by Ernest Hemingway. Even being a morning person, there is a need for a place in the night, and I think of this story at certain times.
I so far have had no luck finding this place. I am sure it is out there somewhere. In my mind, this third place needs to have a patio, like the one in the story, so that I can be in the open air and in my feelings at the same time while I read or drink something. Or do what Matthew McConaughey was doing at the cafe.
Looking on Google Maps one night, I thought I found it, and it was a place near my home, so I was especially excited. From the reviews, I saw that the place has a massive open window at the front, through which I saw what looked like a patio setup. The room was well-lighted but also still dim (I am increasingly sensitive to light). I noted their hours were also open late, and in my mind I thought this was a high-potential location.
I grabbed the book I was reading and headed out to have a deep night at this new cafe. Yet, when I got there, the front seemed different. I saw no chairs, and the windows were closed. I figured it was still worth a look, and I continued in.
Immediately wrong. It was loud and not a cafe at all, at least how I saw it. It was a hookah lounge with club music dialed up to 100, and everyone there was with their group of friends. No solo-person like myself to signal my dream was possible.
Yet, instead of turning around and leaving this obviously wrong place, I dove in. I didn’t want to feel like a fool, so I pressed farther in, panicked, and pretended like I was looking for my group of friends. I clenched my book under my arm viciously, hoping it wasn’t obvious as I popped my head around a corner, fake scanned the room for my people, shrugged in false disappointment, and quickly left.
Defeat.
And Next
I am thinking about my question for this project: why do some places make me feel awesome?
When I think of this challenge to the idea of home, then I might have to answer this question by saying: because different places are for different things. The home and work have their place in society, and the third place does as well.
In fact, that’s an essential premise of the book:
What the panoramic view of the vital city fails to reveal is that the third realm of experience is as distinct a place as home or office…In the United States, the middle classes particularly are attempting a balancing act on a bipod consisting of home and work. That alienation, boredom, and stress are endemic among us is not surprising. For most of us, a third of life is either deficient or absent altogether, and the other two-thirds cannot be successfully integrated into a whole (Oldenburg, 1999, p. 15).
There is a need for this. Having tried to build one, I can’t remove my bias, but I am ready to believe there is a need for community and places to find that, and I think that’s a fairly intuitive agreement.
For now, the search for a night place goes on. I would agree with Oldenburg’s sentiment that US society has not done well to preserve and prepare community spaces for better life satisfaction. Home, for sure, will remain a special place for me because it is also one of the few places where silence can be found, but what stands ready for our other needs?
For me, I love the programming and resources that the DC public library system and the very many museums offer. I see these institutions making a move.
But we have to at least understand how profoundly where we are impacts how we are. Thus, we need to imagine how else things can be.
More soon,
Trevor
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