Is a car a room?
To answer this question, we must define a room.
Let’s say we define a room as a contained space with perimeters that create the edges of that space. I’m sitting outside at Amanda and Tyler’s farm, The Orange Door Farm, and as I look out at several rows of vegetables surrounded by a fence, it strikes me that for a room to be a room, one of its perimeters must be a ceiling. It doesn’t have to be called a ceiling; it just needs to be elevated from the ground and connecting to the other perimeters. The perimeters can be permeable — a room with a door is a room whether that door is open or closed.
This definition of a room grows from its component parts, the elements whose inclusion render a room, a room. But that leaves out a potentially crucial vantage point — functionality. What purpose does a room serve? How does a room function?
Perhaps the purpose of a room is to create an enclosed space where entities can gather or be gathered. A silo is a room, a barn is a room, a bedroom is a room.
But unfortunately, this seems to suggest that an upside-down box is a room, because it satisfies both the component-driven and functionality-driven definitions:
An upside-down box, sitting on the ground or another surface, is a contained space with perimeters, one of which is a ceiling.
An upside-down box is an enclosed space where entities can gather or be gathered.
But guys! The writing’s on the wall! A box isn’t a room!
Is that because a box is too small for me to fit in? Must a room be large enough for me to fit in for me to categorize it as a room?
No, because a dining room in a dollhouse is still a room, even though I personally can’t fit into it.
So… is a box a room?
Still no. Because, well, it just doesn’t feel like a room.
In his story THE TRUTH OF FACT, THE TRUTH OF FEELING (from the collection EXHALATION, which I really can’t recommend enough), author Ted Chiang describes a fictional culture that has two words for the English word for true: “There is what’s right, mimi, and what’s precise, vough.”
Right now, I’m trying to speak vough but getting caught up in what feels mimi. It seems like I believe — I have been taught? — that to be rigorous is to speak vough fluently. To define things as they are and not as they feel. Because feeling is subjective, and subjectivity obfuscates definition, and definition is what we’re setting out to achieve. So if my definition of a room includes upside-down boxes, that means my definition of a room just isn’t precise enough.
In trying to define a room in vough, I am trying to remove my own perspective from the equation. I am trying to explain a room as a room is and as a room functions, without my experience of a room affecting that explanation or function. A room qua a room.
Is that really something I can do? How? How can I transcend my own perspective? How can anyone?
I don’t know how I’d feel if I stood inside a box as big as a room, cardboard above me and all around me.
I think I’d feel like I was in a room.
By this point, it seems like a car is a room.
At the very least, a car could be a room.
This is the first one of these newsletters I’ve written in about six months. I tried writing others but stopped because I felt like I kept arriving at the same conclusion. And though I thought this edition would lead me elsewhere, I have once again arrived at this conclusion. Which is, roughly, the idea that anything can be anything. A car can be a room, if you use it like a room, and if it starts to feel like a room.
So what’s left to ask?
I’m not sure.
Do you have any questions?
I’m really asking. If you’ve made it this far in my newsletter, and you have a question, reply to this email, tell me your question, and I’ll do an investigation of it as an edition of this newsletter. Email me, text me, contact me however you like.
It’s very possible that I am so preoccupied with this anything-can-be-anything idea that every question will tie back to it. I’d like to find out. But to do that, at this point, I need to go beyond my own questions. So, just in case you didn’t catch it the first time:
Do you have a question?
Tell me, if you want to!