Ode to My Small Apartment

by Joshua H. Liberatore

A few months shy of thirty-two, and I’m staring down my final week of lean urban living in the latest in a series of small apartments that have kept me comfortable, efficient, and solvent for the past ten years. It’s a very warm feeling in some ways, and I look forward to all the benefits that owning a house (i.e. renting from a bank) and enjoying more space and more greenery will provide me, but preemptive nostalgia for the modest domicile I’m leaving behind tempers my excitement. And so I pause for reflection.

    For all the months of rent money hemorrhaged away to landlords over the years, my small apartment, like its many predecessors, has offered the hidden value, a very un-American virtue, of keeping my belongings small, in the sense of both their individual size and their collective inventory. One simply owns less in a small apartment. That translates into less to organize, less to clean, less to maintain, less to lose or damage, less to worry about getting taken by masked thieves entering under the cover of darkness, and indeed – since I am bent this way – less to dispose of in the final move and commit to the waste heaps of postmodern consumerism. It’s a refreshing thought, this lack of accumulation, and the converse notion that more space imminent on the horizon – even just a little more – will lead to more stuff is a faintly depressing, if natural concomitant to middle class maturity. Will I get larger too, I wonder?

    Beyond its material capacity, my small apartment has shaped my relationships, my marriage and friendships, in not insignificant ways. Family visits tend to be brief and involve air mattresses, nearly constant discussions about whether to turn on fans or use the air conditioner, and shared meals cramped around an expandable table serviced by mismatched chairs, minimal flatware and crockery. These inevitable features of life in a small apartment build character, foster patience, and because small spaces force us to rub shoulders and step over extended limbs more than perhaps we’d like to, they prevent us from avoiding the very human contact that keeps our feet firmly on the ground.

    In our small apartment, my wife and I have learned to prepare dinner together with deft strategy: multiple cutting boards occupying scarce counter space, cupboards opened over ducked heads, dishes instantly washed as more are dirtied, all with the practiced, voiceless language of veteran dance partners in some delicate pas de deux. In short, we share space where logic and geometry point to its infeasibility as such. And even when these constraints frustrate, they strengthen our intimacy in a way that a larger space would not.

    Our small apartment, of course, because ours, is just the first among equals in a building of many small apartments. Thus, our daily movements bring us into comfortably anonymous contact with others. The tremendous power in the sound of my neighbor’s nightly sneezes that resonate through our wood floors (or is it our ceilings, we can’t be sure) comes nowhere near cacophony. On the contrary, it always brings a smile to my face, and I shall miss this routine amusement in the quiet of the single-family setup that awaits me. (Will he likewise miss my throat clearing?) The simple and superficial niceties that take place near the mailbox, in the laundry room, outside the basement storage, among people of unknown name and occupation, will be replaced by whatever solidity shapes the relations of people who share yards and shrubs. The pleasure of meeting well-groomed dogs in the corridor, on their return from a morning stroll, as I make my way out the door to start the day will be supplanted by the smells of competing barbecues and the growl of Saturday gas mowers. Not necessarily worse, but not quite the same charm either.

    Please do not mistake my nostalgia for regret, for I do not leave my small apartment under duress. As sanguine as I feel about the coming transition to house living and the promise of community, I merely hope to keep within me all that I have learned and gained from so many years in a small apartment, in the comfort of small things, and living among other small people with small overhead costs. Spaces may shape us, but only insofar as they become what we create of them, and the attitude we bring to their occupation, the way we fill them up with our bodies and possessions. In this sense, my move from small apartment to small house doesn’t seem so daunting after all.

Impossible Silence

by Natalie Giacone

One of her jobs
is to pray at every bungalow in their estate.
She’s in formal garb,
carrying a tray of burning incense.
She floats over her movements,
mermaids her way in
tightly wrapped skirt
across my porch.
I’m in love and she’s ten.

I bite into scrambled eggs,
and her head turns
She holds her poised formality,
but her full lips smile,
and I see a child.

“Hello,” I must speak
But she disappears to the altar.
I don’t follow.

Wiping my chin,
she envelops back
in front of me
to an altar I didn’t know existed.

She looks,
closes eyes,
sprinkles water,
and lips foreign words
that I feel
in all my numb places.

Left right left
in front of me
again
she bends
to place more incense.

In her growing hips,
I see the woman to come,
and I worry for her.

“Thank you,” I must speak
in the smoke
of the impossible silence
of
our
blessings.

The Federalist Project 4

“The Politics of Constitution-Making” and The Federalist 15 – 20

In the first half of “The Politics of Constitution-Making,” Rakove undertakes a broad survey of the theme of “compromise” at the Constitutional Convention, focusing, naturally, on the two historic moments of negotiated concession, concerning: 1) the issue of the Senate as the “upper” house of Congress, assuring equal representation among the states; and 2) the calculation within the southern states of slaves as 3/5 of a person for representation purposes. These two compromises, it goes almost without saying, cannot be separated. Small-state worries about domination at the hands of large, northern population centers in the House of Representatives were part-and-parcel of the debate over how to count slaves. Big-state resistance to the notion of equal representation among states in the Senate – ignoring the demographic imbalances it implied – fed into the politics of slave calculation in a very direct way. For his part, Madison continued to articulate his distrust of the state legislatures as sadly lacking the “wisdom and stability” requisite for political vision, what Rakove aptly calls “parochial concerns” inhibiting a necessarily “broad view of the national interest.” How to deal with the “peculiar institution” of slavery in the context of the Convention was a prime example of Madison’s fear of factional interest hijacking policy, most sharply annunciated in Federalist 10. Here, the dominant view among northern states, as noted by Rakove, “accepted the accommodation with slavery as the price union,” a stiff price indeed, given the bloodbath that was its all but inevitable legacy in the 1860s, not too mention its aftershocks felt in the 1960s.

    The debate over slavery had many dimensions, of course, but a few require special mention. At the core of the discussion was the two-pronged problem of population as the basis for representation (not necessarily a given, according to Rakove) and the protection of property as a rationale for confederacy (widely assumed, but not unanimously agreed upon). Slaves had the dubious distinction of being both property and population, and also, strictly speaking, neither. Given the high-minded rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, slavery in the American tradition was always an intuitive paradox of the highest magnitude. The famous 3/5 compromise only added further paradox, befitting the starting point of original hypocrisy.

    The discussions that sprung up around this hot-button issue highlighted the wisdom and accuracy of all Madison’s fears, in particular the “need to safeguard the conspicuous interest of North and South,” which inspired in this case, a “defensive orientation” within both camps, not at all conducive to principled negotiation. Was the convention serving “a society embracing a multiplicity of interests or a nation divisible into two great and potentially antagonistic factions”? The fact that slaves would be counted as subhuman bits of property had the unintended effect of “overvaluing the suffrage of the free male population of the slave states” while simultaneously undercounting the physical residents of an entire region. The moral dimension of the compromise, and the Founders’ abject failure to acknowledge it as such, goes beyond the scope of the present discussion, but nevertheless underscores the limited, practical nature of the Convention’s core objectives.

In Federalist 15–20, Hamilton and Madison begin a serious of lectures, replete with historical examples, on the inefficacy of weak confederacies in surmounting the general chaos and anarchy attending loosely-defined federal systems. Hamilton surveys the dismal results of ancient Greek city-state leagues, the German empire, and the United Netherlands in an effort to place the American experiment in a historical context and offer salutary reminders of just how much was at stake in the revised union. The overall picture is one of eventual dissolution of the confederacy, eternal jealousy among member states, and the nearly constant threat of warfare. A single jaw-dropping passage from Federalist 20 perfectly captures the mood of this series:

Let us pause, my fellow-citizens, for one moment over this melancholy and monitory lesson of history; and with the tear that drops for the calamities brought on mankind by their adverse opinions and selfish passions, let our gratitude mingle an ejaculation to Heaven for the propitious concord which has distinguished the consultations for our political happiness (137).

In this remarkable prose, we can detect an early kernel of what later manifests as the doctrine of American exceptionalism, by which Americans somehow convince themselves that they are more blessed, more deserving, and less encumbered than other peoples and other times. In Hamilton’s case, the feeling was historical, informed by broad reading, active participation on the shaping of his society, and of course, his membership in one of the most talented generations in political history. The contemporary affliction, on the contrary, is notably ahistorical, based on mythical optimism and cultural ignorance, a sense of entitlement without rational basis or existential certainty, and hence, much more dangerous.