The Most Harmonious Poverty; or,
De l’art de choisir un vase plutôt que son fauteuil

My first apartment in San Francisco was decorated in Mid-Century Modern with barely pronounceable Swedish names, which sounds considerably more intentional than it was. I liked clean lines, simple furniture, low prices, and things that looked good without requiring me to understand what era they came from. More importantly, I had a chair.

I loved that chair. It was easily the most comfortable seat I have ever owned. I could sit in it for hours. The first time I saw the chair in some SoMa showroom, it immediately reminded me of the chair my grandma used to have when I was little that we were absolutely not allowed to sit in. Ever. Of course, I had to have it.

Over time, as happens to all good furniture, it became worn in exactly the right spots. Eventually, the springs adjusted to my weight and the exact shape of my seating apparatus. It became the gravity that drew me back to my tiny San Francisco apartment. It was positioned exactly where I wanted it, and like most truly excellent pieces of furniture, it had long since stopped being something I noticed. It was simply where I sat. And I could sit in it whenever I wanted to, without worrying about grandma catching me.

Then someone gave me a vase.

I loved the vase, too. Immediately, which should’ve been the warning. It was beautiful, vaguely Chinese (vaguely, I would later learn, was apt), and substantial enough that putting it somewhere inconspicuous seemed almost insulting. So I gave it a prominent position in the living room, somewhere guests would see it when they came in and, more selfishly, somewhere I could look at it from my favorite chair.

The vase looked terrific.

Suddenly, the drapes looked shabby.

That was strange because the drapes had not been shabby the day before. Nothing had happened to them overnight. They had not faded dramatically in protest or been attacked by moths. They were the same perfectly acceptable drapes I had been living with quite happily before the vase arrived. From IKEA.

But now there was the vase.

So I bought new drapes. Not from IKEA.

The new drapes looked terrific with the vase. Unfortunately, they made the couch look wrong. The couch was Mid-Century Modern with a barely pronounceable Swedish name, and whatever the vase was doing, it was decidedly not that. I had now created a room in which two things agreed with each other and the third looked as though it had wandered in from another apartment.

Obviously, the couch had to go. Have I mentioned that the vase and I lived on the third floor of a three-story walk-up?

I found some sturdy friends and a couch more appropriate to my vase. One thing was easier than the other. Then the living room rug looked wrong with the new couch. It was a little too modern, not quite tasteful enough for the vase, which by this point had begun interrogating every piece of furniture I owned.

So I replaced the rug. This solved the rug problem and created the chair problem.

I should remind you that I loved this chair. It was the most comfortable chair I had ever owned. There was nothing wrong with it. It performed the principal function of a chair: allowing a human being to sit comfortably. And no one else was allowed to sit in it.

It started to look shabby. Hold up.

That word, shabby, matters. In 1768, Denis Diderot wrote Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre; ou, Avis à ceux qui ont plus de goût que de fortune, usually known in English as Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown. Diderot had acquired a beautiful new dressing gown, and the damned thing immediately started causing problems. See where this is going?

His old possessions, perfectly serviceable before the new robe arrived, suddenly looked shabby beside it. The room around him changed. It became more elegant. The philosopher became less happy.

Diderot, being Diderot and also French, had considerably more elegant language for the shabby little world his new dressing gown had displaced: Humble. Enfumé. Troué. Mesquin.

And then, my favorite: l’indigence la plus harmonieuse.

The most harmonious poverty.

Diderot was also an eighteenth-century philosopher and man of the Enlightenment. I am me: Shabby.

Diderot understood what had happened well enough to complain about it beautifully, but he wasn’t actually the person who gave us the Diderot Effect. That name came much later. In 1988, anthropologist Grant McCracken used Diderot’s story in Culture and Consumption to describe what he called “Diderot unities” and “the Diderot Effect”: the way a new possession can destabilize the relationship among everything we already own. One new thing establishes a different standard. Suddenly the things around it don’t quite fit. We buy something else to restore coherence, which creates another discrepancy, which requires another purchase, and before long a perfectly innocent dressing gown has opinions about the furniture, or a vase has thoughts about a chair and it gets chucked into the alley.

I replaced my old chair with one that photographed much better. It was also considerably less comfortable, but comfort had somehow ceased to be the relevant criterion. I had begun by rearranging my apartment to make room for something I loved. Somewhere along the way, I had started getting rid of things I loved because they didn’t make room for it.

Still, the living room looked fantastic.

There was only one problem. From the living room, you could see the hallway. The hallway had not previously troubled me. It was a hallway. Its principal responsibilities were connecting the front door to a couple of rooms and preventing me from having to climb through walls. But now, viewed from my increasingly coordinated living room, the hallway looked wrong.

So I redecorated the hallway. From the hallway, unfortunately, you could see the stairwell. At this point, you’re probably one step ahead of the author. Again.

By the time I was finished, a vase someone had given me had effectively redecorated a substantial portion of my first San Francisco apartment. The Mid-Century Modern furniture I actually liked had been displaced by an increasingly elaborate Chinese aesthetic. The comfortable chair was gone. Everything coordinated. Everything made sense with everything else.

The apartment looked great. It just didn’t look like my apartment. I had somehow created a home that looked as though it belonged to a Ming-dynasty mandarin. I am decidedly not a Ming-dynasty mandarin. I was a young white guy living in San Francisco’s Castro district who liked Mid-Century Modern furniture and had somehow appropriated an entire culture because somebody gave me a vase.

There was one additional problem: The vase wasn’t Ming.

I learned this from a friend with an art history degree who also happened to be Chinese, which made the entire situation considerably more mortifying. She looked at the object around which I had reorganized an alarming percentage of my domestic life and delivered her assessment: “Looks like it came from a tourist shop in Chinatown.”

Well.

We would later joke about my Ming-ish vase. She objected to that, too: “It isn’t even Ming-ish.”

There is something almost comforting about the ordinary version of the Diderot Effect. We buy a nice jacket and suddenly need nicer shoes. We replace the television and discover the entertainment center looks dated. We renovate the kitchen and realize the dining room now looks shabby. The machinery is easy enough to recognize once someone gives it a name, and the moral appears equally easy: beware of the thing that makes you want more things.

My vase taught me something slightly more troubling.

Nothing was wrong with my drapes until I put the vase beside them. Nothing was wrong with my couch until I changed the drapes. Nothing was wrong with the rug until I changed the couch. And there was absolutely nothing wrong with my chair.

The chair had not become shabby.

I had changed the system in which I was judging it.

Every correction made the apartment more coherent, and every bit of additional coherence gave the new standard more authority. At some point I was no longer asking whether I liked something, whether it was useful, whether it was comfortable, or even whether it belonged to me in any meaningful sense. I was asking whether it fit.

Those are not the same question.

The especially embarrassing part is that the organizing principle didn’t even have to be true. I had not transformed my apartment around the vase itself. I had transformed it around what I thought the vase meant. The distinction cost me a perfectly good chair.

False premises can produce beautifully coherent rooms. Eventually, I got rid of the rest of it and went back to Mid-Century Modern furniture with barely pronounceable Swedish names.

The decor of my people.