(In case you haven't guessed it, my url ("aboatofmyown") is an homage to the title of this book.)
In the book, Pollan is in need of a Fortress of Solitude in which to work and write. But in thinking about the ideal place (a process in which he relates in a deep way (slightly too much for my tastes) with H. D. Thoreau and the whole Walden thing. Which is not to discount his premise or belittle his experience, but it struck me personally as a bit junior-high English class coming-of-age term paper. But I digress), he determines not only does it need to be a physical place, a freestanding room in the woods (as opposed to a quiet corner by the firplace) but also that he has to build it himself. For some of us who work in numbers, emails, and whose whole contribution to society is a sheaf of paperwork taller than ourselves, there comes a need to contribute something more concrete.
I quote Pollan:
I had a dense tangle of reasons for wanting to build something, but one of them was to join the world of makers--homo faber-- and leave, if only temporarily, the dodgier world of words. . . At the end of his day, the builder alone could say--and yet didn't need to say, because there it was--he had added something to the stock of incontestable reality, created a new fact.
That resonates with me.
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