Cleanliness, Next To …

Reading one of Christopher Tollefsen’s recent Public Discourse essays—to which I drew some attention in my post from a few weeks ago—I came across these beautiful lines:

Human beings are domestic animals: they establish and belong to households. These households are, in many ways, the physical expression and bodying forth of their person: of who they are, both individually, and with the others with whom they form the household. As such, there are many resemblances between the persons who are domestic, and the domus in which they live: just as children resemble their parents, so does the household, in its operation, organization, physical appearance, and interrelation to the rest of the world resemble the family.

The resemblance is inexact, and can be hampered by many intervening considerations, such as poverty or disability. Yet two points seem noteworthy.

The first is that good and just characters and human relationships are, when things go well, expressed and bodied forth into the world in fine and beautiful homes. Good people do not like to live in filth and ugliness, in decay and stink. Nor do they like to live in opulence and display: beauty is not found in the expression of vanity. They work to make their homes a visible image of their lives, bringing clarity and order to the natural resources around them. They humanize their surroundings and make them habitable, not simply survivable. Many of us have surely had the sensation of walking into a home and recognizing it as telling us something good (or bad) about its owner. We can be wrong in those judgments, but they are based on a reality.

I’ve never made my bed in the morning with such a sense of purpose as I have in these past few weeks.