An evening in three rooms
Edward Bellamy once wrote that music on demand would be “the limit of human felicity.” Walk through an ordinary apartment and look again — almost everything in it was once a miracle.
scroll to move through the apartment
The sitting room
The sitting room
It is a little after eight. A song you chose an hour ago is still turning in the corner, low enough that the room keeps its own quiet. You set the glasses on the table, touch the lamp, and take the chair as if the evening had been waiting for a reader.
If we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained.
Edward Bellamy, 1888 — From Looking Backward. Before recordings, listening to music meant having instruments or performers nearby, and favorite songs could go unheard for years.
The people, almost with bated breath, stood overwhelmed with awe, as if in the presence of the supernatural. The strange, weird light, exceeded in power only by the sun, yet mild as moonlight, rendered the Court House square as light as midday.
A witness at Wabash, Indiana, 1880 — The night Wabash became one of the first cities lit entirely by electric light.
A museum without walls has been opened to us, and it will carry infinitely farther that limited revelation of the world of art which the real museums offer us within their walls.
André Malraux, 1947 — Le Musée imaginaire / Museum Without Walls.
The very shadow of the person lying there fixed for ever! ... I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest artist's work ever produced.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1843 — On first seeing a daguerreotype.
It is not twenty years since there was discovered the art of making spectacles ... one of the best and most necessary in the world. I myself saw the man who discovered it, and I talked with him.
Friar Giordano da Pisa, 1306 — A sermon at Santa Maria Novella, Florence.
Of all the marvellous achievements of modern science, the Electric Telegraph is transcendently the greatest and most serviceable to mankind. It is a perpetual miracle, which no familiarity can render commonplace.
Briggs & Maverick, 1858 — The Story of the Telegraph.
A great good, and almost a divine benefit to the world.
Jakob Wimpfeling, 1505 — On the new art of printing. A hand-copied book was valuable enough that libraries chained theirs to the desks.
The kitchen
Nine finds you at the counter. You run the tap until the water is cold, open the refrigerator without quite knowing what you want, and turn an orange in your palm while the kettle begins to sound.
Water! Water! is the universal note which is sounded through every part of the city, and infuses joy and exultation into the masses.
Philip Hone, 1842 — On the arrival of Croton water in New York City.
Like lovers' kisses, she biteth — she is a pleasure bordering on pain from the fierceness and insanity of her relish.
Charles Lamb, 1822 — On the pineapple.
The first transport of ice from the shores of the United States to the banks of the Ganges is an event of no mean importance ... the names of those who planned and have successfully carried through their adventure at their own cost, deserve to be handed down to posterity with the name of other benefactors of mankind.
The Calcutta Courier, 1837 — New England pond-ice arriving in tropical India.
It is said that these things come from the earthly paradise; for the wind blows down the trees in paradise, just as the wind blows down the dry wood in the forests of our own land.
Jean de Joinville, c. 1309 — On spices netted from the Nile. A pound of ginger once sold for the price of a sheep.
The back room
By ten you are in the back room, washing your face, tipping a pill into your palm. The bicycle on the wall and the machine in the corner can wait until morning; tonight you only notice the window, and the thought of a flight.
You have erased from the calendar of human afflictions one of its greatest. ... Future nations will know by history only that the loathsome smallpox has existed, and by you has been extirpated.
Thomas Jefferson, 1806 — Letter celebrating Jenner’s vaccine.
Before whom, in all time, surgery was agony; by whom pain in surgery was averted and annulled; since whom, science has controlled pain.
Epitaph of W. T. G. Morton, 1871 — First public demonstration of ether anaesthesia.
It just felt like I was the wealthiest person in the world. It felt great not to have to go outside to go to the restroom.
Patty Doak, 2003 — Recalling her family's first indoor bathroom, rural Iowa.
I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.
Susan B. Anthony, 1896 — Interviewed by Nellie Bly.
Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded Washing-Day. Ye who beneath the yoke of wedlock bend, With bowed soul, full well ye ken the day
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 1797 — From her poem Washing-Day.
What philanthropy failed to accomplish, what religion, poetry, eloquence, and reason had sought in vain, has been produced by — the Sewing Machine.
I sometimes think that the desire to fly after the fashion of birds is an ideal handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.
Wilbur Wright, 1908 — Remarks at a banquet of the Aéro-Club de France, Paris.
At eleven the last switch goes down. You silence the phone, set it face-down, and put your head on the pillow. In the dark the apartment is still there — only quieter, as if it had been waiting for this too.
Restlessness survives even a room like this. The speaker, the tap, the ice in the box, the bicycle hung out of the way — they are a gallery of other centuries' labor, of people who argued and invented so that an ordinary night could look the way this one does.
It honors them to feel the old awe for a moment. Not as a lesson, but as a way of looking: to see that what sits quietly on a shelf was once the edge of human luck, and that someone, somewhere, is still making the next commonplace thing.