Settling on the site of a new building is a momentous act, at least if you stop to think about it. That not everybody does is obvious from all those buildings that crouch like strangers on their own land, looking out of place or simply oblivious. Yet it may be that you can think too much about site selection. Because deciding on the right place to build is also uncannily simple, a process in which the advice of the senses and intuition is often your most reliable guide. I of course came to this realization very late, and only by the most roundabout path.
The momentousness of the decision was all I could think about. Wherever I put my building, it would stay, more or less forever. I’d have to live with the consequences of the choice as long as I was around, and others would be stuck with it after that. Charlie had said that key elements of my building’s design, its scale and skin and fenestration, the way it met the ground and the pitch of its roof, would be determined by this first fact. Then there were the views to consider (from the building, and of the building), the fall of light across its floor, the movement of air around it, the ambient sounds, the angle at which it met the late-day sun. Dwell too long on so many soon-to-be-set-in-stone characteristics and the decision is liable to paralyze you. I know, I am only talking about a hut, an outbuilding. Yet I felt that by choosing its site—a single place out of all possible places in which to build—I was setting this great big contingency in motion, rolling it down the steep, one-way hill of personal and local history.
Faced with any such large decision, my first instinct (if you can call it that) is to look for a book to tell me what to do. But I was surprised to find that the literature of architecture and building contains remarkably little on the subject. Lewis Mumford had complained back in the fifties that the proper siting of houses was a lost art, and I turned up little to suggest it has since been found.
Mumford pointed me all the way back to Vitruvius, whose famous treatise on architecture, written in the first century B.C., offers some sensible advice on the siting of cities, dwelling houses, and tombs, all of which, he maintained, should be located according to the same principles. Vitruvius advises the prospective builder to seek a spot that is neither too high (where exposure to wind is a problem) nor too low (where it may be subject to the “poisonous breath of the creatures of the marshes”). He cautioned that a site can be intrinsically unhealthy and recommended that the builder slaughter an animal that had grazed on it and examine its liver for signs of disease. But nothing deserved closer consideration than a building site’s position with respect to the sun, and Vitruvius spelled out principles of orientation that have not been improved on (which is not to say they have always been heeded): Buildings should be laid out on an east-west axis, with their principle exposure to the south. This means that in the Northern Hemisphere the low angle of the sun in winter will keep the building warm, while during the summer, when the sun passes overhead, direct sunlight will enter only in the morning and evening, when it will be welcome. For the same reason, he recommended an eastern exposure for bedrooms, western for dining rooms.
Remarkably, American architecture had to rediscover these simple rules in the 1970s, when the Arab oil embargoes suddenly made heating oil precious. For a long time before that, our houses had been plunked down pretty much anywhere a developer’s lot-lines dictated. According to Mumford, Americans have never been particularly sensitive to site, a fact he attributes partly to cheap energy and partly to the eighteenth-century scheme, promoted by Thomas Jefferson, to impose a great Cartesian grid over most of the nation’s land, with no regard for topography, drainage, or grading, let alone aesthetics or convenience. This division of the country into equal, square parcels of land may have made for easy surveying and speculation, but it discouraged the sensitive siting of buildings.
Of course there is more to choosing a site than orientation to the sun. For example, what sort of topography was I looking for? How should the new building relate to the house? How do you go about judging the relative hospitality of a patch of ground? What exactly was my place in this particular landscape? As far as I could tell, the Chinese had been the only culture to devise a systematic method of site selection. But fêng shui sounded very arcane to me, if not kooky, and for a long time I avoided reading anything about it. I eventually found myself turning to the garden designers, who seemed, at least in the West, to have thought more about how architecture should fit into the landscape than the architects had.
The most pertinent advice I found was in the garden literature of the eighteenth century in England, when for a brief moment, some of the best minds of the culture, from Alexander Pope to Horace Walpole to Joseph Addison, turned their attention to landscape design. These writers had thought long and hard about exactly what constituted a “pleasing prospect,” as well as about the aesthetic and psychological experience of landscape, and since the picturesque gardens they promoted made abundant use of small outbuildings, which they called follies—a word I strove to keep as far from discussions of my project as possible—there seemed to be a lot that applied.
Since the original impetus for my building had begun with the notion of improving the view from our new bedroom window, the romantic designers—who were among the first people in the West to develop a taste for natural scenery—seemed ideally suited to the project. They worked to make every prospect in their gardens look “natural.” What they meant by this was that a landscape should look not like nature as we commonly find it, and as I had found it outside my window, but as it appears in landscape paintings—“works of Nature [being] most pleasant,” Addison wrote, “the more they resemble those of art.” In the landscape paintings the Romantics revered, nature tends to be well-composed (divided into foreground, middle ground, and background) and pleasingly varied (particularly in terms of light and dark). It also offers the spectator’s eye an inviting path to follow from one element to another, but especially from the foreground to the distant horizon.
Without being conscious of it, the dissatisfaction Judith and I had felt with the new view from our bedroom window probably owed something to our picturesque expectations, which most of us acquire growing up in this culture. All the elements of a pleasing landscape were present—fields and trees and even, now that we’d dug a small pond, water—yet there was something wrong with the picture. It was uninviting. Specifically, the scene offered the eye no reason to travel from the foreground to the background, or any path on which to do so. By adding what the Romantic designers used to call an eye-catcher, we were hoping to tie the little fortress of cultivation down by the house into the broader landscape above.
But exactly where in the picture should my eye-catcher go? My first impulse had been to put the building somewhere along an imaginary line extending out from the main axis of the garden. For many years, this line, after following the fieldstone wall and the perennial border, would pass through the arbor and then lapse into an impassable tangle of boulders and brush. This particular no-man’s-land occupied the space between a pair of fine but inaccessible trees, one a white ash and the other a great, leaning white oak. The situation was somewhat improved after we dug the pond and used the spoils from the excavation to regrade the rocky area between the two trees. Today, the path journeys out to the pond, skirts its north bank, and then climbs what is now a gentle, grassy rise between the ash and the oak before settling in a small, circular meadow drawn around a stunted old swamp maple.
It seemed to me there were a couple of possible building sites along this axis, the most obvious being the bank of the pond. And for a while a pond-house seemed like an appealing idea. I could picture a little shingled shack with a dock out front jutting over the water. Though I eventually discarded this idea (it seemed too cute), it did help me appreciate how a particular site could shape my image of the building. I also rejected the site beneath the oak; the tree branched so high overhead it didn’t look as though it would afford a building much sense of shelter.
But I’d also begun to doubt the wisdom of building right on the main axis of the house and garden, and in this I found strong support among the picturesque designers I consulted. They detested straight lines on aesthetic as well as political grounds—axes being closely associated with “the formal mockery of princely gardens” on the continent—and made sure their paths always curved. A path that eventually relinquished its geometry seemed in keeping with the character of this landscape, which is to grow progressively less tended the further you travel from the house. There was also something a little too obvious about a building that confronted you at the end of such a straight line. Putting it on axis would make it seem closer too, when my goal, I’d begun to realize, was to make these few acres feel more like a world. But if instead I situated the building at an angle to the main axis, and then made the approach to it slightly roundabout, the workings of perspective and psychology would make it appear that much farther away—and make the property seem that much larger.
Now I was approaching the problem as a picturesque designer might, deploying a bit of pictorial illusion to “improve” the landscape and entice the viewer into the scene. I imagined that a Capability Brown or William Kent would have objected to my original plan to site the building in the sun-filled center of the view on the grounds that it would rob the scene of mystery; better to tuck it into a corner of the frame, preferably in a spot where it would be partially obscured in shade. The site should be visible from the house, they would recommend, but only just. The idea is for it merely to catch the eye, to pique the viewer’s curiosity without satisfying it. The location of an eye-catcher should make the viewer want to venture out to the building, there to experience an entirely different sort of mood than the one on offer near the house.
This was no small point, for the picturesque designers were interested in much more than composing pretty pictures. They were concerned with time and movement too, and conceived of their landscapes in three dimensions, striving to make them work as narratives as well as paintings. Follow the path through a picturesque landscape and you will come upon a succession of distinct places, each designed to evoke a different emotion.
I didn’t have anything so fancy in mind, but I did like the idea that the site for my building would offer a different kind of experience than the rest of the property, as well as a new perspective on things. Of course this vastly complicated my site selection. For now I needed not only to find a spot that would add something to the view from the house, but one that would offer its own interesting views, a good place in its own right.
The time had come for me to climb down from my second-floor perch and walk the land. Apart from the turning of pages, I hadn’t yet lifted a finger to bring my building any closer to reality. But thinking picturesquely had taken me some distance, narrowed my search. Now at least I knew the frame in which the site had to fit and where in that frame the site should not fall: the too-obvious middle. That still left a lot of ground to cover, however. I called Charlie to see if he had any advice. He did, though at the time it seemed too glib to be of much use. “Think about it this way,” he suggested. “You’ve been hiking all day, it’s getting late, and you’re looking for a good campsite—just a comfortable, safe-feeling place to spend the night. That’s your site.”
“At a certain season of our life,” Thoreau wrote in Walden, “we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house.” Now I entered my own such season, though I didn’t manage to approach it quite as lightly as Thoreau. (Of course Thoreau was never serious about settling; I was.) The first time I walked the land was a bright June afternoon, the sun directly overhead, and I quickly lost myself in my perambulations. I traced patterns across the property that would have looked antic had Judith or some neighbor happened to notice me, pacing first this way, then that, doubling and then tripling back again, before stopping to appraise a view, a deliberative process that involved a long, slow pirouette through 360 degrees. The second time out, I brought along a chair, planting it in a succession of auspicious-seeming spots, the better to rehearse inhabiting them and observe the landscape’s constantly changing face.
From out here the whole problem of site selection looked somewhat different. I realized I wasn’t just looking for a view, but for something more personal than that—a point of view. What would be my angle on things when I sat down to work? Some spots where I put my chair implied an oblique angle on the world, while others met it more forthrightly. I could see that I was going to have to decide whether I was a person more at home in the shadows, or out in the sunny middle of things. How important to me was the company of a tree, or the reflection of water? Just how available to the gaze of others—on the road, in the house—did I wish the face of my building to be? Some sites I considered offered what seemed like the geographical correlative of shyness, others self-assertion. It was as though the landscape were asking me to declare myself, to say this place, and not that one, suited me, in some sense was me.
And not just for the moment or month or year. (“And there I did live,” Thoreau wrote of the sites he surveyed, “for an hour, a summer and a winter life…”) No, this was for keeps, and there were times when I felt that choosing a site had become a metaphor for every other fateful decision I’d ever had to make, but especially all those ones that went under the decidedly un-Thoreauvian rubric of Settling Down: buying the house, signing the note, getting married, deciding to have the baby, taking the job, giving up the job. (Had Thoreau done any of these things?) None of these decisions had come easy, and yet it helped to remind myself that not one of them had ever given me a moment’s regret either. Maybe I’m the kind of person who just needs to think all his second thoughts in advance. As Thoreau pointed out in Walden, there’s freedom in deliberation (literally: “from freedom”); once that’s over, though, things start looking a good deal more fatelike. Odd as it sounds, there were moments when I felt as though I was picking out not a building site but a cemetery plot—when I felt that sort of bottomless claustrophobia in time.
Which is why I took my sweet time about it, spending uncounted hours walking the property, at every time of day, in every weather, by every conceivable route. I planted my chair in two dozen places, cataloging their qualities, cataloging my responses to their qualities, until I found myself beginning to doubt, in the same way saying a word over too many times can make you doubt its sense, whether I could even say what a place was any longer, what it was that made a place a place. Was I really cataloging their qualities—shyness, forthrightness—or was I inventing them? Was a place something made, in other words, or was it something given?
“Wherever I sat, there I might live,” Thoreau had written of his own less-fraught wanderings in search of a house site, “and the landscape radiated from me accordingly.” And it was true that the landscape did seem to reorganize itself around me and my chair as I imagined inhabiting each site in turn. What had one moment seemed an undistinguished corner of second-growth forest, or an indifferent section of meadow grown up in goldenrod, would all of a sudden become the center of the world. My chair reminded me of the jar in the Wallace Stevens poem, an ordinary bit of human artifice that “took dominion everywhere” and ordered the “slovenly wilderness” around it. This seemed to suggest I could build just about anywhere, since anywhere I raised four corners and a roof would perforce become a place, almost as if by fiat. What is a place after all but a bit of space that people like me have invested with meaning?
And yet not everywhere felt equally right. Tested against Charlie’s advice, the area within the round meadow, for example, did not feel like a very comfortable place to set up camp. It was too easy to imagine eyes in the encircling trees. Also, a spot like that was always going to feel a little arbitrary. Why not pitch the tent ten feet this way, or twenty that? I might have succeeded in making a good place there, but I would be starting virtually from scratch. Perhaps my landscape, or my sense of landscape, was not as democratic as Thoreau’s, or Stevens’s, because certain spots proclaimed themselves more loudly to me as places already—the landscape seemed to radiate out from them, as it were, even before I happened to plant my seat there.
There was, for example, this one particular area—right away I want to call it a place—that seemed almost to exert a kind of gravitational pull whenever I drew near it. It was a small, unexpected clearing on the south side of a boulder easily as big as a sub-compact car. I recognized the rock from one of Judith’s paintings; she’d spent the better part of one summer working in this clearing. I kept returning to this spot in my wanderings, something it occurred to me my predecessor’s cows had probably also once done, for the clearing opened right onto the shady path they trudged from the barn each morning on their march to the upper pasture.
The floor of the clearing, which is hidden from the cow path by the big rock, is pitched, but at a much gentler angle than the path, making it feel almost becalmed, like a small, placid eddy shunted off to the side of a rushing river. I remembered Judith mentioning what a pleasant place it had been to work. It’s not hard to imagine cows stepping off the path to rest here, lying down with their broad sides to the boulder’s south face, which would hold the sun’s warmth when the leaves were off the trees. But they’d pause here in summer too, since the clearing then is shaded and cool. The “placeness” of this spot seemed unmistakable, even to cows.
A half-dozen young trees rise along the base of the rock, white birches and choke cherries mostly, with long flexing trunks that arc out over the clearing and open their thin canopies directly above it. Overhead, they interlace their leaves and branches with another rank of trees that lean over to meet them from the far side of the clearing, joining to form a high, almost Gothic arch. This second group of trees, which contains more cherry and birch as well as some white ash and silver maple, forms a rough hedgerow, strewn with boulders, that divides the clearing from the lower meadow. The farmer probably dug out and dragged these boulders from this field when he first plowed it, and the trees grew up among them, colonizing any spot his tractor couldn’t reach. From the clearing you can peer through their silhouetted trunks into the sun-filled field.
Early one morning at the end of June I brought Judith, who was seven months pregnant, back to look over the spot, since by now it was under serious consideration as my site. As we followed the curving path I’d worn through the rough grass and weeds, I realized the route was in keeping with good picturesque practice: You registered several distinct changes in the mood of the landscape as you moved from the lucid, sun-lit geometries of the house and garden, up around the pond and into the shadowy woodland, where you even passed by a suitably melancholy ruin—a collapsed handyman’s shack. When Judith stepped into the clearing, she pointed out the good light; this is what had drawn her to the place originally. The sunlight here was uncommonly delicate, finely divided by the relatively small leaves of the trees overhead, and made lively by the birch leaves, which the slightest hint of a breeze was enough to flutter.
Together we examined the views. Two of them were very fine. Looking back toward the house, the landscape sloped down in the middle distance to the pond, which was neatly framed by the big oak and ash and provided a welcome still point in the rolling scene. Beyond the pond stood the rose arbor, now clothed in deep purple clematis, and the path back to the house. It wasn’t what you’d call a picturesque view, since so much in the picture looked cultivated rather than natural—“gardenesque” seemed more like it. But there was something appealing about gazing down from this shady, unseen lair onto such a sunny, well-tended scene, with its enterprising geometries of house and garden. Here was all our familiar handiwork—the clipped apple trees and the right-angled beds, the tidy stone walls and the rose climbing up the trellis on the back porch—but the new perspective, which was angled obliquely to the property’s layout and elevated several degrees above it, rendered everything slightly unfamiliar.
One hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction offered a less tended but equally appealing view. Here was a dark funnel of foliage—the cow path—conducting your eye through the woods toward the upper pasture, where all of a sudden the green field detonated in the sun. The view reminded me of the moment at the baseball stadium when you first catch sight of the blazoned green playing field at the end of the dark alley burrowing beneath the stands.
Not all the views were quite this good, however. To the north, above the rock, it was only fifty or so yards as the crow flies to the neighbor’s raised ranch, and though right now, in high summer, I couldn’t see it for the trees, during the seven months of the year when the leaves are down the house’s canary yellow vinyl siding would be on display. The dilapidated green cape house of another neighbor, a cranky old guy who lived alone, was also visible to the southeast, on the far side of the small meadow. His frequent tumultuous efforts to raise a wad of phlegm, the report of which rolled like thunder across the intervening meadow, offered regular reminders that this place wasn’t paradise.
I stayed behind while Judith walked back toward the house; when she reached the door, I stood up on my chair waving my arms so she could get some idea of what the building might look like from the house. I shouted to her to have a look from the bedroom. She reappeared in the second-floor window, giving me the thumbs up. I sat down in my chair to take stock.
The spot certainly had a good aura about it. Whether it was the rock or the light or the clearing, you felt right away that this was somehow a privileged place. I thought of Charlie’s campsite test. Except for the fact that the ground sloped a few degrees, the site seemed to meet its requirements. A tent pitched in this clearing would have the boulder to its north, providing protection from the wind and maybe even a bit of residual warmth during the night. Tucked under these trees with the big rock at your back, this did not seem like it would be a scary place to spend the night. You could see a lot from here without being easily seen yourself.
This last seemed like a particularly fitting quality for the building I had in mind. The hut was going to be my study, after all, a place in which to think and read and write—to observe the world in solitude. The site seemed to chime with my dream for the place, especially the obliqueness of its angle on things, the company of the boulder, the delicate shade—too thin for melancholy, but shadowy enough that you didn’t feel exposed and not so cheerful that you couldn’t think. The betweenness of the site seemed auspicious too; its sense of standing on the hedgey margin of things, between field and wood, sun and shadow. The place stood apart, and I knew it was that part of me—the self that stood a little apart—that I intended this building to house.
I moved my chair this way and that, trying to decide which direction I’d want my desk to face. The untended landscape that Thoreau would no doubt have opted for—the one looking up through the woods to the field of overgrown grasses—didn’t appeal to me nearly as much as it should have. (When Charlie first saw the site, he automatically assumed the building would face the field.) It was a beautiful view, especially when the meadow’s grasses burst into light at the end of the shadowy corridor. But to face that way meant turning my back on the house and garden, on that whole middle landscape Judith and I had worked so hard to make, and which I liked to write and think about. So I turned my chair 180 degrees around, positioning it so that the two big trees framed the gardens and the house, and then I took my seat there in the cool of the shade. There it was, my life, flooded in summer light, clear as day. There was the childhood home of my child-to-be, the house I was about to be the dad of. There in the open window was my wife, moving pregnantly across our bedroom. And I realized then that though I may have wanted a hut in the woods, it was definitely not Thoreau’s cabin in the wilderness that I was after. It might be that I wished for a place that stood a little apart from this life of mine, but only to get a better view.
I also realized, sitting there before my imaginary desk, that the image of my hut was growing steadily more concrete. What had originally been conceived in two dimensions, a feature in a landscape as seen from a window, was now acquiring a third: I had begun to see the building from the inside out. The hut dream had a setting now; looking out at the world through its imaginary windows, I felt reasonably sure this was it.
By now there should have been no question that this was indeed the place. All the picturesque angles checked out, it’d passed Charlie’s campsite test, I thought I’d felt its gravitational pull. I’ve never been a great one for trusting my instincts, however. And though I liked the view quite a lot, surely there were a dozen other potential sites with a similar orientation. What did it really mean, anyway, to say a “place felt right,” or that it had a “good aura”? It all was starting to sound a little New Age-y to me.
You see, I was having another instinct, which was to find an intellectual theory to second my first instinct. That’s why I’d looked up the picturesque landscape designers in the first place. But now I wondered if I couldn’t find an entirely different theory to confirm me in my choice or, failing that, point me toward another.
The time had come to read a few books about fêng shui. This was a chore I’d been putting off since a couple of years before when I’d picked up a treatise on the subject in a bookstore and came upon the following sentence: “The greatest generation of chi occurs at the point where the loins of the dragon and the tiger are locked together in intercourse.” What exactly do you do with a tip like that? A line drawing sought to clarify the point: It showed a dragon superimposed over one ridge of mountains confronting a tiger superimposed on a second ridge; in between them, down where their midsections met, an X marked the optimal site for your house or tomb. (There it was again!) I really couldn’t see how such an approach could possibly help me, but I decided to try.
The first fêng shui primer I consulted—The Living Earth Manual of Feng-Shui by Stephen Skinner—said that “the amount of chi flowing, and whether it accumulates or is rapidly dispersed at any particular point, is the crux of fêng shui.” “Chi” is the Chinese word for the earth spirit, or cosmic breath, which flows in invisible (but predictable) currents over the face of the earth, following both the natural and manmade contours of the landscape. This earth spirit animates all living things, and the more of it that enters and lingers in your building, the better. Though matters soon get more complicated, the basic objective seemed to be to find a site well supplied with chi.
I found it helpful to think of fêng shui as the terrestrial counterpart of astrology. It is concerned with the influence of the earth spirit on human life in much the same way that astrology is concerned with the influence of the heavenly bodies. But while there’s nothing we can do to influence the planets’ paths, there is apparently a great deal we can do to influence the path of chi through a landscape, first through proper site selection and then through site improvement. In this respect fêng shui is a form of gardening. Like picturesque garden theory, it tells you how to improve a landscape, but to spiritual rather than aesthetic ends.
So where do the dragons and tigers come in? Evidently the Chinese visualize the tallest forms in a landscape as a writhing dragon, and this high ground is the wellspring of chi. “The ridges and lines in the landscape form the body, veins, and pulse of the dragon,” Skinner writes, and the dragon’s “veins and watercourses [known as dragon lines] both carry the chi” down from the highest elevations. (You might assume that maximum quantities of chi will be found at the top of a hill, which is true, but because exposure to the four winds disperses chi so quickly, hilltops are generally considered poor sites.) The tiger is a similar though less prominent land form. A good site will have a dragon to its east and a tiger to its west, and face south, which the Chinese regard as the most beneficent of the cardinal points. Stripped of animal metaphors, the practical import of this principle is that people should build among hills, on ground neither too high nor too low, on a site that is open to the south and has higher ground to its north—advice, by the way, that Vitruvius would enthusiastically endorse. A more general rule of fêng shui holds that the topography of a site should strike a balance between yang land forms (the “male” ones, which tend to be upright) and flatter yin, or female, ones, such as plains or bodies of water.
My brain crammed with these elementary principles, I paid a visit to the site, aiming to see it now with the eye of the geomancer, or fêng shui doctor. It appeared I had a good balance of yin and yang, since the site stood at the meeting place of forest and field. Also, the big rock seemed to offer a suitable yang to the yin of the clearing. The land rises precipitously to the east of the site, so I had what seemed like a nice-size dragon exactly where I wanted it. But try as I might, I could not find a tiger anywhere, which was discouraging, at least until I read in one of the books that wherever you find a dragon, there will automatically be a tiger too. I had no idea how they could be so sure, but decided not to worry about it for the time being. Because right now I had chi flows to worry about.
As far as I could tell, chi has a lot in common with water. At least it helps to think of it that way, especially if your spiritual development is as retarded as mine. Like water (which also animates life), chi flows down from high ground through rills and swales in the land and then accumulates in lakes and rivers or, less propitiously, in swamps (where, hemmed in, it’s apt to turn into sha, the negative energy that is chi’s evil twin). And in fact several authorities state explicitly that water is a “conductor” of chi.
As soon as I’d begun to think of chi as flowing water, I could visualize its movement over my land, as it searched out grooves in the earth and openings in the forest on its course down the hillside. To map a landscape’s dragon lines, a fêng shui doctor will sometimes travel to the top of a ridge and then run down it several times as heedlessly as possible, noting the various paths he naturally inclines toward, the points at which they intersect, and the places where his momentum is checked by hollows or inclines. The practitioner is said to be “riding the dragon,” something animals do as a matter of course. (And in fact animal paths are considered reliable conduits of chi.) Though I wasn’t quite prepared to ride the dragon, I thought I could picture where it would take me more or less, and it looked as though there was a positively torrential flow of chi coming down the hillside, most of it streaming down the cow path toward the pond.
This seemed auspicious. At least until I delved deeper into the literature of fêng shui and learned that the quantity of chi isn’t everything—speed is just as important. And when a dragon line is particularly straight or steep, the chi is apt to travel too swiftly through the site to confer its benefits. Ideally, chi should meander through a site; torrents were no good. I felt proficient enough at visualizing the flow of chi to see that it was moving at a very rapid clip through the property, and probably whizzing right by my site in a feckless blur.
I don’t mean to make fêng shui sound like a lot of hocus-pocus, because the more I learned about it, the more its images of energy flow and velocity began to square with my own more secular experience of landscape. Don’t we also think of landscapes in terms of speed and energy? We commonly describe a hill as rising “slowly” or “rapidly,” and we conceive of curves and straightaways in terms of their velocity. Once I began to think of fêng shui as a set of time-tested metaphors to describe a landscape, rather than as spiritual dogma, it became a lot less strange, and potentially even useful.
I realized, for example, that everything that had been done to improve our property in the last century or so—the scooping out of plateaus for the house and barn, the opening of fields on the gentler hillside slopes, the repair of the drainage around the house, and, most recently, my digging of a pond—had the unintended effect of improving the fêng shui. My predecessors here and I have been unconsciously engaged in the work of moderating what had been (and to some extent still is) a tumultuous flow of chi through the property, creating fields and ponds, plateaus and gardens where it might slow and linger, and rerouting one main artery so that it would circle around the house.
I started to see how a fêng shui doctor analyzing a given landscape’s chi and the picturesque designer studying its genius loci would end up recommending much the same improvements. Both would advise that straight paths be made to curve, that flat land (where chi is thought to stagnate) be rendered more hilly and rugged ground made to slope more gently. It seemed to me that the “eye” whose attention Humphry Repton or Capability Brown spoke of attracting and directing with their clearings and paths and follies isn’t so very different from the chi that fêng shui seeks to attract and direct. Likewise, the picturesque sensibility’s preference for variety in the landscape—its emphasis on the transitions between field and wood, hill and dale, light and shade—might just be another way of expressing the geomancer’s preference for those places in the landscape where yin and yang land forms meet. I don’t know if it’s ever been checked out, but I would bet that the fêng shui of English landscape gardens is exemplary.
Over the years my own landscape had come a long way, in fêng shui as well as picturesque terms, though clearly there were still problems. But I figured I was better off with an oversupply of chi close by my site than a shortage of it. The question was whether it could be encouraged to stick around long enough to be of some value. And there seemed to be only one way to find out. What I attempted now was so alien to my constitution, so ridiculous to my accustomed way of thinking, that I still can’t fully believe I actually did it. I told no one, not even Judith. But I decided to ride the dragon.
On the appointed afternoon I walked all the way to the top of the hillside, keeping an eye on the road to make sure I wouldn’t be observed. Then I started walking fairly rapidly in the direction of my site, quickly picking up speed until I was just about flying down the hillside. I tried as best I could not to steer, emptying my mind of any specific destination. I found my feet were quickly drawn to the cow path—obviously a dragon line. And if I stayed on this course, a powerful sensation of momentum promised to propel me straight past the big rock and smack into the middle of the pond. Had I kept to that trajectory I’m not at all sure it would have been possible to stop. But when instead I leaned my weight just slightly to the left immediately before reaching the rock, something that the lay of the land seemed to encourage, I moved into the site itself and immediately felt the gentler slope of the terrain slowing my velocity, welcoming me. My body still registered some forward momentum, but now it was an easy matter to slow and pause and rest. I felt the truth of a metaphor I’d earlier used to describe the site, that of an eddy shunted off to the side of a rushing river; there was definitely an eddying of chi taking place here.
As I stood in the clearing catching my breath, it occurred to me that this episode represented the first physical effort I’d applied to the project, and it had yielded more than I would have guessed. By riding the dragon, and temporarily shelving my usual cerebrations, I’d managed to elicit the testimony of my senses, acquired a kind of bodily knowledge of my site. For though my well-read eye had prepared me to see that the clearing’s fêng shui probably had a lot going for it, it was my legs that had confirmed me in this, given me a vivid, physical sense of its hospitableness. Now I knew I had—because I’d felt it—an ample, if still slightly obstreperous, supply of chi. Knew it, in fact, in my bones.
But was I prepared to credit that bodily knowledge? Of course not. Reverting to type, I decided to subject my site to one last, impeccably Western test—a scientific analysis. I read up on human habitat selection, a relatively new discipline that seeks to combine the insights of sociobiology, geography, and what is called environmental psychology. I figured that if I could now justify my choice of site on scientific grounds, I’d be set.
The theory of human habitation selection was first proposed in 1975 by an English geographer named Jay Appleton and seconded, more or less, by sociobiologist E. O. Wilson in his 1984 book, Biophilia. The premise of this Darwinian theory seems reasonable enough: Human beings, like other animals, have a genetic predisposition to seek out for their habitats those landscapes that are most conducive to their well-being and survival. Having spent 99 percent of our time on earth as hunter-gatherers, Homo sapiens should have acquired a predilection for landscapes that offer a high degree of what Appleton calls “prospect” and “refuge”: places that offer good views—of potential supplies of food as well as sources of danger—without compromising a sense of shelter. For the hunter-gatherer, those places that allow one to see without being seen have an obvious survival value.
It is no coincidence that the type of landscape richest in opportunities for prospect and refuge is the savanna, where it is thought that the species evolved. For an upright, ground-dwelling biped, these flat or gently rolling grassy plains, punctuated by bodies of water and copses of trees, are at once abundant in visible sources of food and water and relatively safe: From the shade of the trees, one can look out over a great expanse of land with little risk of detection. Sociobiologists like Wilson suggest that a predisposition toward our optimum primordial habitat survives in the form of a pronounced aesthetic preference for savanna-like landscapes—evident in the design of our parks, picturesque gardens, and suburbs.
In his collection of lectures The Symbolism of Habitat, Appleton demonstrates the importance of symbols of prospect and refuge in the history of landscape painting and architecture. A pleasing landscape painting or garden, he maintains, will be one that offers both kinds of symbols, along with some visual means of traveling from one to the other. Among the symbols of refuge he mentions are trees, copses, caves, and buildings; horizons, hills, and towers function as symbols of prospect, and paths or roads serve to link the two kinds of imagery, facilitating the viewer’s exploration of the scene. The picturesque painters and landscape designers were masters of the symbolism of habitat, Appleton contends, and this is why their ideas and creations have endured.
Whether our attraction for the symbolism of habitat is a matter of biology or simply an old and successful habit, Appleton’s theory does help account for the gravitational attraction we feel toward certain kinds of landscapes—and, specifically, for the attraction I felt for my site. For certainly the clearing by the rock offered a high degree of prospect and refuge. Any rock this big affords a sense of refuge, and this particular rock—at the wooded edge of a field, and overlooking a pond—offered fine prospects as well. On my next visit to the site, I decided to try to see it through Paleolithic eyes. The perspective of a twentieth-century hunter was the best I could manage, but I could easily imagine such a person crouched down close to the rock, peering unseen into the lower field or down toward the pond, where grazing animals would be apt to congregate. Prospect and refuge, seeing without being seen: this was the very essence of my site.
So could it be my site had the sanction of the human genome itself? Maybe my instinct about the place (my first instinct, that is, not the subsequent one that drove me into the stacks) was the voice of some dim primordial urge—maybe, in other words, it was not merely a metaphorical instinct but the actual genetic mechanism that governs human habitat selection. It’s hard for me to think of myself as being even remotely in touch with such a thing (hence instinct number two). But perhaps this is where Charlie’s campsite test comes in: The exercise of trying to imagine a place as a safe spot to sleep is a way of putting us in closer touch with any deep, atavistic impulses we might feel about it. For what is camping, after all, but a temporary reversion to the life of the hunter-gatherer? Sleeping outdoors, beyond the envelope of civilization and technology, instantly renders the value of prospect and refuge vivid once again.
At first it seemed uncanny to me that the three different perspectives I’d tried out on my site could have overlapped so closely. Yet of course if the scientific perspective is correct, and there is some biological basis for our landscape preferences, we should probably not be too surprised that cultures as different from one another as Ming Dynasty China and Augustan England would have developed vocabularies that find so many similar things to praise in a landscape: Both may be articulating the same deep attractions.
Yet what confirmed me in my choice finally was no one test, but the very fact that all three perspectives—science and art and mysticism—had evidently concurred: this uncanny, almost mystical alignment of theories and metaphors. The analysis to which I subjected my site may have had all the trappings of rational inquiry, and I suppose I brought the proper enlightenment skepticism to bear on the process, but in the end what was I really doing? Hunting for a patch of sacred ground on which to build, and an authority—or, in my case, three authorities—to consecrate it, to say, Yes, this clearing in the woods is the right place.
I figured that if the artist, the geomancer, and the scientist all agree, then maybe this place was really as special as it felt. None of them may possess the “truth” about what makes a good site, but together they represent a couple thousand years of human experience of the land, which might be as close to the truth of the matter as I could hope to get.
It’s possible that this almost magical sense of place I’ve been describing is an anachronism, something we will overcome as we accustom ourselves to the Enlightenment idea of space that Thomas Jefferson was advancing with his great grid—the powerful concept that space is the same everywhere, that it’s continuous, centerless, edgeless, and organized in strict adherence to the laws of Euclidean geometry. Someday we may feel perfectly at home on the big Cartesian grid, giving our addresses in x, y, and z coordinates.
And yet powerful as this notion of space is, I’ve discovered it doesn’t rhyme very well with the body’s own experience of space, whether riding the dragon or simply sitting in a chair. The testimony of our senses seems adamant that space is full of interruptions and breaks and places qualitatively different one from another—places that seem to us special, if not magical. All the vocabularies of place I consulted, and the long human experience they represent, concur in the conviction that space is in fact discontinuous, that place is sometimes found and not made—that there is finally something more than a modernist’s glass jar giving structure to the landscape. Something like these bodies of ours.
That jar of Wallace Stevens’s notwithstanding, ever since the day I stumbled on this site it has felt like a place I found rather than chose. Sitting out here on a summer afternoon in this sweet, sweet spot of shade, raising up around me these four imaginary walls and perfecting in imaginary rafters the roof of arching boughs that partially shelters me already, the sense that here is a good place to be, to build, seems a fact fully as real, as given, as the big rock sitting here beside me. How could I ever have doubted it? I may have come to this knowledge the long way around, but now I understood—knew in my bones!—what the farmer’s dumbest cow had understood without a moment’s bovine reflection. This is the place.