Sunshine on Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith

Author:Alexander McCall Smith [Smith, Alexander McCall]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-345-80441-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-08-11T16:00:00+00:00

39. The Caravaggio Within

We go in – just as we always do, thought Dr. Macgregor as he led his daughter into the dining room of what John Gifford and his co-authors of The Buildings of Scotland would have described as a polite villa. That description had struck him forcibly when he had opened the copy of that work given to him by Pat as a birthday present some years earlier, and discovered that his house in Dick Place, along with others like it, was a polite villa. It was at the same time both dispiriting and reassuring; dispiriting in the sense that to live in a polite villa implied that one’s life was rather dull: the connection between building style and personality type may not be a necessary one, but it nonetheless exists in many cases, whether as cause or effect – that might be difficult to tell. People who live in small, neat houses may be big-hearted and large-souled – few people can afford large houses, the sorts of houses in which high-ceilinged and spacious thoughts might be imagined to flourish; we may, after all, have to live in some small town in central Scotland rather than Paris but that does not mean that the inner Parisian cannot flourish wherever we are. The danger, of course, is that we spend time imagining that we would be happier elsewhere, and forget to cultivate happiness where fate has placed us. Auden’s image of the child, scolded in France, wishing he were crying on the Italian side of the Alps came to his mind, and he thought: we are all that scolded child.

So while the size of one’s house said nothing about oneself – except in those cases where people buy ostentatiously large houses to impress others with their grandeur, and there are many of those – the state of living quarters spoke volumes about the one who lived there. Untidy people lived in a state of disorder, and this reflected their personality and their mental habits. Ordered people lived neatly: cut their hedges, did their washing-up regularly, made their beds in the morning. It was so obvious. Send me a picture of your room and I will tell you who you are. Somebody had said that once at a seminar Dr. Macgregor had attended at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and some present had laughed at what they saw as an excessively simple aphorism; and yet sophisticated laughter, he thought, was so often misplaced.

Physical untidiness and the untidy mind … were they always linked? Every proposition, it seemed, could look less than universal when subjected to close examination; every rule had those glaring exceptions that made it look much weaker. Auden was famously untidy; his suits were dishevelled, bore on their fabric soup stains, cigarette ash, detritus of indeterminate origin; his flat in New York was piled high with books and manuscripts and brim-full ash trays; he kept chocolate puddings on the bathroom floor as that was colder than the fridge; and so on.

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