The ancient Romans had their Lares and Penates: their gods of the home. The Lares were associated particularly with the hearth, the Penates with the store cupboard.
The appeal of this mythology-for me-is the way it holds together two levels of thought that, all too often, drift apart. The intimate space and ways of being which occur at home are connected to the grand and noble vision of the spiritual world.
Not so long ago I read an intriguing book called Don't sweat the small stuff . It's an appealing thesis: we shouldn't worry too much about the little things in life. And sometimes that is very good advice. In a hundred years time, of course, it won't much matter whether I was late for some appointment or other. The problem is, of course, that much of life is made up of small stuff. It might be a better strategy-sometimes -to try to invest the small stuff, the little things, the details of the day, with a finer meaning, a richer resonance. As someone puts it in a Tolstoy novel: the point of civilisation is to make the necessities of life into sources of satisfaction.
The Lares and Penates hold out a promise of just this kind. The hearth and the store cupboard could be seen in a purely Utilitarian light; and those who deal with them-who cook and clean and light the fire -might be minor functionaries. But the Household Gods are a cultural reminder of the real centrality of these things: the myth provides a way of appreciating these things.
Appreciation is a creative process. If you care about the store cupboard, you exercise an art of arrangement; your satisfaction is enriched if the storage vessels have some integrity and appeal of their own. The most illuminating vision of this I know of comes in a painting by Velasquez, entitled Christ in the House of Martha and Mary . Christ -the spiritual teacher -has come to the house and is conversing about higher things. But we cannot talk without eating, so one of the sisters-Martha-has to go to the kitchen to prepare a meal. She is miserable: she is missing out, she thinks, on the great moment. In the painting, however, Velasquez has taken exquisite care in the depiction of the food-some fish and garlic-and the bowls, plates and utensils. They are simple objects, without the slightest pretension to glamour or great meaning. But they are utterly beautiful in the simple, real dignity. In other words, the work that Martha has to do can have its own dignity-but it gains that through the character of the objects with which she works.
The craft of those who made these objects has allowed the objects to have their own appeal and worth. The Lares and Penates need their reverence too-and that comes through the cultivated habits of the hand: the way a mortar and pestle (to take an example from the picture) have been fashioned for use; and the acquired skill in using them-these come together. And it is this simple beauty, this integrity of the objects-which becomes the vehicle for the dignity of the task. The necessities of life become sources of satisfaction.
Not long ago I was visiting an old homestead: for generations a small working farm. They had some old pieces of equipment, among them a forge fitted with a fan for driving air into the coals. The fan was worked by handle, which I could not resist turning. It was a moment of revelation; the handle turned with delightful ease; yet there was a feel of real work-not a mere weightless spinning in the void. Some fine alignment of its weight, some perfect fitting of its gears made the movement neither laborious nor empty-a mere weightless spinning in the void.
This handle, it seemed to me, was eloquent. It spoke not just about the job-forcing air into the coals: it understood, and sought to enjoy, work. The handle, as it were, already knew the person whose job it was to turn it.
Think of the tactile knowledge that lives in that turning mechanism: the feel for weight and balance-not as an idea, not as a thesis, but as an experience.
It's an important point that the intimate household gods were not exactly the same as the gods of the Forum-the gods, as it were, of public life. This is a way of imagining the allowable differences between public and private existence. We can't solve-or even address-the problems of the wider world by tidying the linen cupboard or by finding a good pot for a plant. But we must not worry about that. The household gods are not the public gods; we are allowed to care for things at home; they don't have to be answerable to the public good-that is a task for other places and other times.
This thought came to my mind when I was visiting some friends in London. Their home was something of a showcase for avant-garde art. Even the dinner table had a big line to spin: it was 'about' international politics. This struck me as a confusion of realms, a misplaced good will. Here the gods of the Forum had entered the home-where, in fact, they could achieve nothing. I sensed that these people were awkward with 'the small stuff' and wanted to import the urgency of the outer world to 'save' this item of furniture from 'just being a table'. The better strategy-the strategy of the Household Gods, of the Velasquez painting and of the beautiful handle-is to allow these things just to be the best version of themselves. They should not speak to us in headlines.
The idea of craft is-as the name suggests-partly to do with how something that is made 'craft' alludes to the practice, the practical sensitivity and skill of the maker. But the human position of craft is illuminated by our needs: we need these ways of making because they are central to life.
It is urgent, today, that we recover-in our own terms-what the Romans knew in their fashion; we need our household gods-we need to find ways of revering what might (in a fast paced, technocratic, glamour-seeking age) be overlooked; we need the things which make domestic life to understand us, to know us, and to be guardians of what we hold dear.
