Put Your Desk in the Corner

A trip to the beach inspires an examination of what we put at the centre of our lives.

Vintage Massachusetts postcard. Source: Boston Public Library

We drove out of the city, after five days of weather so hot it felt like concrete could melt. The weekend was finally cooling after the heatwave, and it was my wife’s birthday, so two of our closest friends got in our car and we made for a beach. It was more than the heatwave that I was trying to outrun; it was a week of writing like I was on a treadmill — going as fast as I could and staying still. I had ideas, none of them good; I wrote words, a few of them just fine; housework was piling up around me as I gave everything to an essay that wouldn’t form. I needed a break.

At the beach, the four of us spread out our towels and took novels out of our canvas bags. Glancing across the titles, we laughed at our collective pretentiousness exposed: we prided ourselves on an intellectualism that was utterly belied by the featherweight reading we’d brought. A book group novel full of saccharine platitudes, a sequel to a successful summer blockbuster, a YA fantasy, and — this one was mine — Michael Crichton’s Timeline.

When my mental energies are spent, the intellectually meaty stuff of literature is more than I can digest. When my emotional state is too temperamental for anything meaningful (serious depression is a shadow that lingers near me no matter how bright the sunshine), emotionally dense literature is reduced to nothing but sadness. In these valleys of exhaustion, there’s a type of fiction that I can still read even if — or, rather, because — it doesn’t challenge me. I’d rather read that than read nothing at all. It’s my way of recharging without shutting down entirely, a kind of cognitive standby mode.

On the beach, the fried circuits of my mind repaired themselves as I lost myself in Crichton’s ridiculously fun story about a group of time-travelling historians. Seagulls, and the breeze on which they drifted, and the water’s slow tidal drift towards our feet provided a sonic landscape that opened up the soul. All of its clutter was washed away with each shush of the waves. Just as I was easing into full mental and physical relaxation, I read something that teased my curiosity.

In one of Crichton’s many passages of research disguised as dialogue, a historian is explaining the layout of a medieval town called Domme. She describes the market as the town’s reason for existing as and where it does:

“‘You can see it clearly, in the way the town is laid out. Look at the church over there,’ she said, pointing off to the side. ‘In earlier centuries, the church was the centre of the town. People went to Mass at least once a day. All life revolved around the church. But here in Domme, the church is off to one side. The market is now the centre of town.”

I rolled over onto my now lobster-pink front, brushing sand from one foot with the other, and considered the shift from religion to commerce as a unifying function. The sudden arrival of a seagull near our heads, scrounging for scraps of sandwiches, reminded me where I was. I was here to relax, not to churn out more content from the idea mill my brain had become during the stressful week. Still, notions formed, questions coalesced, and I put my book aside to think about what we place at the centre of our town and, by extension, our lives.

Not long before that weekend, I’d written a piece about the place that physical books occupy in our homes, and what that says about what we value. It can be just as informative to look at how we spend our time. What we fill our time with reveals what we are devoted to. The word devotion has its roots in the Latin for consecrating something, which is to declare it sacred. I began thinking of moments in my day as a temporal space, each with something at the centre, and I asked myself if those were things I’d consider sacred.

The object at the centre of my mornings had become, regrettably, my phone. I’d fallen into a habit of turning off the alarm each morning and rolling back into bed. Half-conscious and nagged by the sense that I should be doing something, I sought the illusion of productivity without effort. I’d pick up my phone and skim the latest news updates, telling myself that I was being an informed citizen. My first interaction with another human every day was through the simulacrum of conversation on social media. I was ingesting the opinions of others before I’d had a chance to acquaint myself with myself. It was hard to know what I thought and felt through the noise of other people’s feelings and thoughts.

I put my novel down on the sand (I was in full philosophical mode now; my reading was over) and thought that there was very little of the sacred in this haphazard morning routine. I recalled what the critic Cyril Connolly wrote about the morning:

“O sacred solitary empty mornings, tranquil meditation — fruit of book-case and clock-tick, of note-book and arm-chair, golden and rewarding silence, influence of sun-dappled plane-trees, far-off noises of birds and horses, possession beyond price of a few cubic feet of air and an hour of leisure!”

Of course, I only recalled the “sacred solitary tranquil meditation” part; I had to look up the rest when I got home. But the sentiment has always stuck with me as a pure distillation of what I want from my mornings. To achieve it seemed simple enough: remove my phone from the symbolic centre of that space. And what about the rest of my days, which over the past week had been full of work I didn’t enjoy but felt compelled to do? Why was I pushing to the edges of my life all of the things that make a life worth living? I should have been centring friends, family, faith, meaningful work, good food, “the fulfilment of the spirit through the body”, which was Connolly’s prescription for happiness.

Back on that beach, I also remembered a passage from Stephen King’s memoir-cum-style-guide, On Writing. When I got home later, I looked up the pages where King writes about how he’d dreamed of a desk made of a “massive oak slab that would dominate a room”. Eventually, he got such a desk and planted it in the middle of his study. He then spent six years sitting at that desk “either drunk or wrecked out of [his] mind”. When he sobered up, King “got rid of that monstrosity and put in a living-room suite where it had been”.

“In the early nineties, before they moved on to their own lives, my kids sometimes came up in the evening to watch a basketball game or a movie and eat pizza. They usually left a boxful of crusts behind when they moved on, but I didn’t care. They came, they seemed to enjoy being with me, and I know I enjoyed being with them.”

King got himself a new desk, one that was “handmade, beautiful, and half the size of the T. Rex desk”. He didn’t place this one in the centre of the room; he put it very deliberately in a corner. This is the first piece of his collected advice to writers:

“Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.”

The tide rolled in and the day cooled down. Eventually, we shook sand from our towels and gathered the remnants of our picnic from the beach. We found a chip shop and bought fat, greasy chips wrapped in newspaper. Sitting on a wall that lined the shore, we watched the sun lowering towards the water and talked about films, and books, and life. In that moment, the centre of my life held friendship, conversation, and nature, and it felt sacred.

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Matthew Morgan writes Volumes.