Do you remember the pleasure of getting new notebooks, in the Septembers of your youth? The sheaves of unsullied, wide-ruled paper were as crisp as the autumn weather. The pages yet unwritten seemed freighted with potential. Anything could happen!
Unfortunately, it took only the briefest contact with a pen or pencil to dispel the magical sense of possibility. You’d write a few lines and maybe doodle on the cover, and the thrill was gone.
If there’s nothing so promising as a clean, blank page, there’s also nothing so mundane as one that’s been scribbled on. Indeed, your creative efforts had the effect of ruining something that had been absolutely wonderful, even though, of course, the only reason the paper existed was for you to write and draw on it.
The same goes for the interior walls of houses. At the elemental level, so to speak, they exist to hold up our roofs. But in their creamy, broad expanses, they also present the same kind of promise and torment embodied by a schoolchild’s notebooks. So long as walls are blank, why, anything could go on them!
Anything could be: an edgy modern canvas, or a series of botanical prints, or a grandfather clock, or an Old Master drawing (or reproduction on poster board), or a cork board, or stencils that turn the whole place into a jungle from a Rousseau painting or, as in a friend’s house, a giant Plexiglas tube filled with fake green apples (really).
And that’s both the joy and the nuisance of it. On a blank wall, as on a blank page, you can put anything.
But once you do, you move from gauzy limitlessness to inky specificity, which in turn means that if you get it wrong — if you stick the nail in the wrong place, or discover that your pictures look silly where you’ve hung them — well, you’re committed. Now you’ve done it! You’ve marked up an unblemished wall and made a mess of things.
The deeply unrewarding solution to which the indecisive resort is to leave walls bare in the uneasy hope that someday, heaven knows when, we will seize upon the right thing to hang on them.
Since most of us are not art collectors possessing exquisite taste and the time and funds to exercise it, this is unsatisfying on almost every level. It means that after living in a house for years many of us are still confronted by great expanses of unadorned drywall that cries out for beautification.
This week I heard its call. In a burst of zeal that surely sprang from the embarrassed realization we’re coming up on four years in our house and still certain pictures are leaning against walls rather than hanging on them, I picked up a hammer and smashed my own inertia. Bang! In went a nail and up went a picture. Bang! Bang! Bang! Suddenly, the reproachful, once-empty wall was covered; imperfectly perhaps, but, my goodness, what a relief. I highly recommend it.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
