More meaning than a hat rack?

Why does a bedroom usually have a chair?  Venture into a teenager’s bedroom and you’ll find it covered with discarded clothes.  True, at least they weren’t left on the floor although it might be a bit better if they found their way to the laundry hamper or were at least hung on a hat rack.  Even if clothes aren’t an issue, having a chair means you don’t have to sit on the freshly made bed to tie your shoes, although this maneuver can take years of training.  More than a hat rack, an empty chair is an invitation to sit and rest, maybe to read, sometimes to recover.

Today, the sickbed is a piece of forgotten household furniture.  For centuries people stopped their normal life activities when they were injured or sick unlike now when medications mask the symptoms and allow the relentless pressure to produce to continue at all costs.  In the past, recovery took time and allowing for that meant special consideration:  travelling to a healthier climate, eating warm, soft and nutritious food, and resting.  Others took care of you.  And you were careful not to expose people to your affliction.  The bed for sleeping and love making was not used, if at all possible, for birthing babies or recuperation.  The place for that was a comfortable chair in a quiet bedroom.

A chair with a foot stool, side table and lamp makes a nest.  French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote a chapter on nests in The Poetics of Space.  He described the human desire to withdraw, to be safely contained especially when sickness lowered your defenses.  These are places of removal from primary activities, and of repose and contemplation.  There they generate the sense of contentment as a refuge from the threatening external world.  Critical to this feeling is the physical fit between the chair and the body.  Nestled in soft pillows, the perfect shape emerges like a reflection of our particular shape and posture.  When the scale of the nest matches our body, a sense of belonging in this world is satisfied. 

How often do you sit in this chair?  Sometimes when efficiency and economy become our paramount motives, every non-essential element is vulnerable to elimination.  Simplifying is not the same as subtracting all objects deemed of no immediate purpose.  A glance into a formal dining room that is used only for holidays and family gatherings can have more meaning as a reminder of those events even if it is empty most of the time.  It’s a place that holds memories.  A glance at the bedroom chair refreshes dreams of quite times, inward times, and times of recovery.  Such a reminder may serve its greater purpose by alerting us to be more aware of the health and vitality we currently enjoy.  Bachelard concludes his chapter noting that it is only with confidence that birds build nests.  Our instincts too are to be confident of the world.  Coming home to the inviting bedroom chair demonstrates this.