A Perched Privacy
Weekly column written for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here.
Last week I was packing up my office stuff in preparation for a move. My school is opening an extension across the road. Unlike the lower school and some other departments, which are moving into the new building, the English Department is only moving from one floor to another in the old building, but still I will miss the tiny office where I have worked for the last 14 years. I will miss the view of the East River and the passing boats.
All moves, big and small, involve complicated feelings. This Sunday I'm flying back to Singapore on my annual visit, back to the country I thought I had left behind in order to come out as a poet and a gay man in NYC. I have made a home of New York, but a made home is not the same as homemade. Those of us who flew away from our birthplace in search of transcendence, whether in art or love, often find ourselves searching for a hearth as well in our adopted city.
This was true of Henry James. In his great novel The Ambassadors, the American expatriate creates a protagonist called Lambert Strether who has traveled to Paris to bring a wayward American son back to his American mother. Arriving at Chad's Parisian house, Strether sees another young man smoking on the third-floor balcony:
"The balcony, the distinguished front testified suddenly, for Strether's fancy, to something that was up and up; [it] placed the whole case materially and as by an admirable image, on a level that he found himself at the end of another moment rejoicing to think he might reach. The young man looked at him still, he looked at the young man; and the issue, by a rapid process, was that this knowledge of a perched privacy appeared to him the last of the luxuries. To him too the perched privacy was open, and he saw it now but in one light—that of the only domicile, the only fireside, in the great ironic city, on which he had the shadow of a claim."
I've always found this passage immensely moving for its imaginative reconciliation of the opposing claims of transcendence and domesticity. It reconciles both claims in the image of the balcony, that perched privacy, which is within our reach. The opposition is not any less fierce in one's birthplace, for, there, the call for safety, for groundedness, is strong. In my next few weeks in Singapore, there will be attempts made to build that perched privacy. I will be talking about the work of Singapore Unbound at a local public-policy institute. Four extraordinary writers will be reading their work at the 2nd Pink Reads in a queer bar. And we will present the 3rd Singapore Unbound Fellowship (NYC) to a young poet and so lure her into the experience of exile. Oh, the irony!
Jee Leong Koh
June 20, 2019
Last week I was packing up my office stuff in preparation for a move. My school is opening an extension across the road. Unlike the lower school and some other departments, which are moving into the new building, the English Department is only moving from one floor to another in the old building, but still I will miss the tiny office where I have worked for the last 14 years. I will miss the view of the East River and the passing boats.
All moves, big and small, involve complicated feelings. This Sunday I'm flying back to Singapore on my annual visit, back to the country I thought I had left behind in order to come out as a poet and a gay man in NYC. I have made a home of New York, but a made home is not the same as homemade. Those of us who flew away from our birthplace in search of transcendence, whether in art or love, often find ourselves searching for a hearth as well in our adopted city.
This was true of Henry James. In his great novel The Ambassadors, the American expatriate creates a protagonist called Lambert Strether who has traveled to Paris to bring a wayward American son back to his American mother. Arriving at Chad's Parisian house, Strether sees another young man smoking on the third-floor balcony:
"The balcony, the distinguished front testified suddenly, for Strether's fancy, to something that was up and up; [it] placed the whole case materially and as by an admirable image, on a level that he found himself at the end of another moment rejoicing to think he might reach. The young man looked at him still, he looked at the young man; and the issue, by a rapid process, was that this knowledge of a perched privacy appeared to him the last of the luxuries. To him too the perched privacy was open, and he saw it now but in one light—that of the only domicile, the only fireside, in the great ironic city, on which he had the shadow of a claim."
I've always found this passage immensely moving for its imaginative reconciliation of the opposing claims of transcendence and domesticity. It reconciles both claims in the image of the balcony, that perched privacy, which is within our reach. The opposition is not any less fierce in one's birthplace, for, there, the call for safety, for groundedness, is strong. In my next few weeks in Singapore, there will be attempts made to build that perched privacy. I will be talking about the work of Singapore Unbound at a local public-policy institute. Four extraordinary writers will be reading their work at the 2nd Pink Reads in a queer bar. And we will present the 3rd Singapore Unbound Fellowship (NYC) to a young poet and so lure her into the experience of exile. Oh, the irony!
Jee Leong Koh
June 20, 2019
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