Free A Place of My Own by Michael Pollan

fitting quality for the building I had in mind. The hut was going to be my study, after all, a place in which to think and read and write—to observe the world in solitude. The site seemed to chime with my dream for the place, especially the obliqueness of its angle on things, the company of the boulder, the delicate shade—too thin for melancholy, but shadowy enough that you didn’t feel exposed and not so cheerful that you couldn’t think. The betweenness of the site seemed auspicious too; its sense of standing on the hedgey margin of things, between field and wood, sun and shadow. The place stood apart, and I knew it was that part of me—the self that stood a little apart—that I intended this building to house.
    I moved my chair this way and that, trying to decide which direction I’d want my desk to face. The untended landscape that Thoreau would no doubt have opted for—the one looking up through the woods to the field of overgrown grasses—didn’t appeal to me nearly as much as it should have. (When Charlie first saw the site, he automatically assumed the building would face the field.) It was a beautiful view, especially when the meadow’s grasses burst into light at the end of the shadowy corridor. But to face that way meant turning my back on the house and garden, on that whole middle landscape Judith and I had worked so hard to make, and which I liked to write and think about. So I turned my chair 180 degrees around, positioning it so that the two big trees framed the gardens and the house, and then I took my seat there in the cool of the shade. There it was, my life, flooded in summer light, clear as day. There was the childhood home of my child-to-be, the house I was about to be the dad of. There in the open window was my wife, moving pregnantly across our bedroom. And I realized then that though I may have wanted a hut in the woods, it was definitely not Thoreau’s cabin in the wilderness that I was after. It might be that I wished for a place that stood a little apart from this life of mine, but only to get a better view.
    I also realized, sitting there before my imaginary desk, that the image of my hut was growing steadily more concrete. What had originally been conceived in two dimensions, a feature in a landscape as seen from a window, was now acquiring a third: I had begun to see the building from the inside out. The hut dream had a setting now; looking out at the world through its imaginary windows, I felt reasonably sure this was it.
     
    By now there should have been no question that this was indeed the place. All the picturesque angles checked out, it’d passed Charlie’s campsite test, I thought I’d felt its gravitational pull. I’ve never been a great one for trusting my instincts, however. And though I liked the view quite a lot, surely there were a dozen other potential sites with a similar orientation. What did it really mean, anyway, to say a “place felt right,” or that it had a “good aura”? It all was starting to sound a little New Age-y to me.
    You see, I was having another instinct, which was to find an intellectual theory to second my first instinct. That’s why I’d looked up the picturesque landscape designers in the first place. But now I wondered if I couldn’t find an entirely different theory to confirm me in my choice or, failing that, point me toward another.
    The time had come to read a few books about fêng shui. This was a chore I’d been putting off since a couple of years before when I’d picked up a treatise on the subject in a bookstore and came upon the following sentence: “The greatest generation of chi occurs at the point where the loins of the dragon and the tiger are locked together in intercourse.” What exactly do you do with a tip like that? A line drawing sought to clarify the point: It showed a dragon superimposed over one ridge of mountains confronting a tiger superimposed on a second ridge; in between them, down where their midsections