In the early 1980s, when I was an editor at Condé Nast’s House & Garden magazine, my colleagues and I were perturbed by an idée fixe of the company’s legendary editorial director, Alexander Liberman. He kept pressing us to make House & Garden more like Architectural Digest, the Los Angeles-based upstart that, under the editorship of Paige Rense, was fast approaching our once-impregnable circulation figures. He must be going gaga, we thought, as we contemplated the flashy, vulgar interiors in that veritable bible of bad taste, which we called Architectural Disgust.
Alex parried our prissy objections with a Machiavellian riposte. “Architectural Digest,” he assured us, “has the hideousness that will attract.” In retrospect, I have never heard a better definition of nouveau riche American aspirations. But nothing we tried could stem our declining newsstand sales and subscription renewal rates, and in 1983 House & Garden was relaunched to take on AD, as it was familiarly known, and we took on the challenge of producing what we believed to be a better version of that Beast of Beverly Hills.
What can possibly be the appeal? The answer lies in our desire for mastery and elucidation. The ability to enhance a life by bringing scaled-down order and illumination to an otherwise chaotic world – a world over which we may otherwise feel we have little control – cannot be overvalued. The fascination of holding in our hands something completely realised at an impossibly reduced scale is a wholly fulfilling one, and the satisfactions of inquisitive observation will never tire. At its simplest, the miniature shows us how to see, learn and appreciate more with less.
How do we heal the heart? As a historian of religion, I often return to the Gnostic Gospels, an astonishing cache of more than fifty sacred texts, discovered in Egypt, in 1945. Many of them speak to this question: How do we gain the courage to overcome grief and despair? In one story, Jesus’ disciples, after his death, meet a doctor who calls himself a “physician of souls”—the literal translation of “psychiatrist”—who turns out to be Jesus himself. After revealing his identity, Jesus offers his followers a box of ointments and a medicine pouch, telling them to “first heal [people’s] bodies,” and then “heal the heart.”
Since antiquity, people have spent enormous time and energy trying to do just that, whether through faith, medication, therapy, meditation, or physical activity. And though I’ve often grappled with such questions while poring over ancient sources, it was only when I faced an anguish beyond my imagining that they acquired a new, startling intensity.
It is black in the Bay of Biscay, just stars above, and below, the canyons. We’re but a crumb out here, floating beyond the continental shelf where it drops from 300m to near 5,000m. Deeper than I can imagine, this wine-dark sea, no one in sight, or radio range. And silent, but for the waves rushing against my little boat, Isean. Stars shoot overhead, but they’ll have to try harder for my attention. I’m staring down, where dolphins are magically lit by phosphorescence. One wonderful creature spins beside me, a trail of stars in its wake. I’m in a trance, my arm trailing the water. The sails luff, I’ve gone off course and look skywards for the Plough – I’m using stars, rather than compass for my bearings. Later, I will somehow fall asleep while dolphins breach by my window.
I can hardly believe I’m here, headed for Spain on my own boat. I wasn’t even expecting to cross the Channel. I’d quit my job to sail around Britain, an idea that took hold the previous summer, sailing in Devon and Cornwall. It wasn’t just the beauty of the coastline, the gentle pace – collecting mussels, swimming with seals – it was the unique perspective. Sailing alone into harbours seeking shelter, I was invited in, not local nor tourist, but part of an ancient seafaring tradition. I found myself at home chatting with Brixham trawlermen, watching old people in Fowey swing dancing to Erasure.