My friend X never unpacks. She lives out of boxes and suitcases. It is not unusual for her to simply abandon her possessions in an apartment or storage locker for which she has not paid rent. I understand this behavior. We both grew up essentially homeless: constantly uprooted and often living temporarily in a space belonging to somebody else. Self-expression through the alteration of our surroundings, even when it was allowed, was pointless and inevitably painful when we had to leave the place to which we had foolishly allowed ourselves to become attached. We couldn’t help but be marked by our experiences. My friend lives out of boxes. I took a different route.

It was possible that I was the world’s only teen runaway with a damask-covered camelback sofa with hand-carved cherry cabriole legs. At least, there couldn’t have been many of us. At fifteen, I was convinced that I could create the home and family I had always wanted. All I needed was the right furniture. And I would do almost anything to get it. I stole carpets from hotel lobbies. I took a job at an interior design shop to pilfer the stockroom. It did not seem unreasonable to unscrew sconces from the walls of a museum if those were the sconces I required to light my way out of poverty, degradation, and filth.

Eventually, I became appalled at my own behavior. I tried to use more legitimate means to give form to what I imagined was a normal life, but I was not very successful. Despite running away, my life still had its share of poverty and degradation (but less filth, I’m happy to say) and several periods of homelessness. I can remember selling that sofa to pay for a bus ticket to California, but I can’t remember when I, too, started living out of boxes.

Since then, I’ve taken a perverse pride in rootlessness and my lack of possessions. What do outward appearances matter, I ask, when the only furniture that really matters is the furniture of the mind? (Yes. I really have said this out loud and I want, here and now, to apologize.) I brag about not buying books, which I deride as outmoded artifacts of our increasingly post-literate world, but the real reason I don’t buy them is that they are just too cumbersome and expensive to move. I may purchase a copy of The Architecture of Happiness, however, if only to remind me of how it has helped me to know myself better.

Hardship, necessity, and a horror of my own depravity led me to give up my materialistic ways and adopt a more Stoic attitude toward beauty, but both responses seem to me to have been driven by a single unmet need for aesthetic appreciation and expression. Alain de Botton sees through me and others who claim that outward appearances are irrelevant to inner attitudes. He writes,

“…professions of detachment [from beauty:] stem not so much from an insensitivity to beauty as from a desire to deflect the sadness we would face if we left ourselves open to all of beauty’s many absences...”

and

“…it can be those most in thrall to beauty who will be especially aware of, and saddened by, its ephemeral character.”

It is too true. My Zen-like cardboard box minimalism is a thin veneer covering my secret unattainable desire for Rococo overabundance and luxury. I’m a fraud, an unhappy fraud, and de Botton has found me out. Fortunately, his book not only made me realize that denial of the need for beauty—although it is has served me well in the past—is untenable, but he has also helped me toward some ideas of how I might adopt a more balanced attitude toward aesthetics. First, I had to see why my defensive rejection of beauty has become less and less effective.

“Our love of home is in turn an acknowledgment of the degree to which our identity is not self-determined. We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.”

It doesn’t seem to me to be a coincidence that his words seem so true and poignant at a time in my life when I have been faced, repeatedly, with my own limitations. Perhaps the young can do without beauty—after all, they are themselves beautiful—but the more I am knocked about by life, the more precious and comforting I find the well-balanced tool, the perfectly seasoned dish, or the skillful combination of colors in a painting or a room. When I see something beautiful, my first reaction is not disappointment and anger that it is not mine; it is a kind of protective tenderness. I am grateful the beautiful exists, whether or not it belongs to me. Increasingly, I have the feeling that great beauty extracts a moral demand from the observer. I am asked to respond in kind: to be something beautiful or to make something beautiful or at least to be sufficiently informed and sensitive to appreciate the beauty I am lucky enough to observe. Even this last duty often seems to be beyond my ability, but it also seems a worthy goal, and a meaningful one, too.

Also beyond my reach: It is unlikely that I will ever have a home and family or that I will be able to stop living out of boxes any time soon. So what is the point in reawakening all this desire when I have little means to fulfill it? Perhaps de Botton’s expansive definition of home is useful:

“Those places whose outlook matches and legitimates our own we tend to honour with the term ‘home’. Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.”

This makes sense to me, especially when I recall how I used to return each year in December to a grove of trees I’d helped plant while in the Coservation Corps. I rarely had a Christmas tree wherever I was living, but I liked to pick one in this grove and decorate it with food for wild birds. I abandoned the practice when I left California, but there are plenty of trees in Washington, too. And maybe there are other ways I can learn to follow de Botton’s advice and learn better how to be at home wherever I am living, with whatever I have got.