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Oliver A
A life preserved
The Tenement House的点评
点评：From the Latin verb teneō, ‘to hold’, we get the word ‘tenement’, which originally meant a land holding. How and when it came exclusively to refer to purpose-built apartment blocks is less clear (or I’m too lazy to research it), but patterns of ownership and tenancy still reflect the feudal origins of the term for many residents today. Miss Agnes Toward, who lived at 145 Buccleuch Street from 1911 to 1965 rented all her life, although as a single, gainfully employed woman of the clerical classes we might have expected her to own her home – expectations were different in her time, especially in cities. She was 73 years old when she had to leave her home for hospital, but she paid rent on it for the remaining ten years of her life, and a very astute woman by the name of Anna Davidson managed to buy the house intact with its contents. She sold it on to the National Trust for Scotland, and it opened as a museum in 1982.
It’s one of those stories of improbable happenstance, like the fossilisation of a bird feather in a tyrannosaur coprolite, which can’t be anticipated, but preserve something immeasurably valuable against all the odds, and all the brutalities of time passing. Of the millions of lives spent in tenements in Scotland in the first half of the twentieth century, Miss Toward’s is the one that happens to have been archived for us, not only with her furniture and personal belongings, but with the documentary record she accumulated as a bill-payer, theatre-goer, letter-writer, recipe-recorder, and all the other written activities that make up a human existence. It reminds me how precarious our history is – what’s always preserved is the record of political leadership, wars, dynastic progression, and big economic trends; but the real history, the sum of human experiences that make up a society, is rarely valued until it’s too late to save it.
The pattern of ownership described above may be the reason for this extraordinary level of preservation – as it wasn’t her property, Miss Toward was reluctant to spend much on modernising it, and didn’t have electric lighting installed until 1960. The National Trust removed it and restored the original gas lighting when they took over, but probably had very little else to do. The tenement today is exactly as it was lived in – homely, respectable, cosy, and decorated with a coherent aesthetic sense. The downstairs flats have been converted into a gift-shop, café and exhibition space, with photo- and text-based displays giving a good sense of the social context before the visitor goes up to look at the first floor apartment. I can’t speak to the displays’ historical rigour, but they’re very effective in giving a sense of what lives were like then, and drawing a few lines to connect them to our own.
I’m old enough to have seen houses with gas-lights and solid-fuel ranges, so Miss Toward’s life probably seems a little closer for me than for someone younger, but hopefully every visitor will be able to feel the reality of the life that was lived here. This is a home, an accumulation of choices, habits, and accidents that prints a person into a place like a potter’s thumbprint on the base of a jug. That may sound sentimental, but I think its truth will be clear enough to anyone who’s had the heartbreaking task of dismantling a home after the death of a loved one. Miss Toward is still here at Tenement House, and it was a privilege to visit her.
It’s one of those stories of improbable happenstance, like the fossilisation of a bird feather in a tyrannosaur coprolite, which can’t be anticipated, but preserve something immeasurably valuable against all the odds, and all the brutalities of time passing. Of the millions of lives spent in tenements in Scotland in the first half of the twentieth century, Miss Toward’s is the one that happens to have been archived for us, not only with her furniture and personal belongings, but with the documentary record she accumulated as a bill-payer, theatre-goer, letter-writer, recipe-recorder, and all the other written activities that make up a human existence. It reminds me how precarious our history is – what’s always preserved is the record of political leadership, wars, dynastic progression, and big economic trends; but the real history, the sum of human experiences that make up a society, is rarely valued until it’s too late to save it.
The pattern of ownership described above may be the reason for this extraordinary level of preservation – as it wasn’t her property, Miss Toward was reluctant to spend much on modernising it, and didn’t have electric lighting installed until 1960. The National Trust removed it and restored the original gas lighting when they took over, but probably had very little else to do. The tenement today is exactly as it was lived in – homely, respectable, cosy, and decorated with a coherent aesthetic sense. The downstairs flats have been converted into a gift-shop, café and exhibition space, with photo- and text-based displays giving a good sense of the social context before the visitor goes up to look at the first floor apartment. I can’t speak to the displays’ historical rigour, but they’re very effective in giving a sense of what lives were like then, and drawing a few lines to connect them to our own.
I’m old enough to have seen houses with gas-lights and solid-fuel ranges, so Miss Toward’s life probably seems a little closer for me than for someone younger, but hopefully every visitor will be able to feel the reality of the life that was lived here. This is a home, an accumulation of choices, habits, and accidents that prints a person into a place like a potter’s thumbprint on the base of a jug. That may sound sentimental, but I think its truth will be clear enough to anyone who’s had the heartbreaking task of dismantling a home after the death of a loved one. Miss Toward is still here at Tenement House, and it was a privilege to visit her.
翻译：“Tenement”一词源自拉丁语动词“teneō”，意为“持有/拥有”，最初用来指被持有的土地。至于该词后来是如何、又在何时专门用来指代专为居住而建的公寓楼，这一点就不太清楚了（或者是我懒得去查证）。不过对如今的许多住户而言，其房产的所有权与租赁关系仍体现出这一术语的封建渊源。阿格尼丝·托沃德小姐于1911年至1965年间居住在布克卢克街145号，她一生都是租房居住，尽管当时她还是单身。鉴于她是一名有稳定收入的文职人员，我们本以为她会拥有自己的房子——但在她所处的时代，人们的期望并非如此，尤其是在城市里。她73岁时不得不离开家住进医院，但在此后的十年里她仍一直支付着房租。后来，一位名叫安娜·戴维森的精明女性设法买下了这栋房子及其中的所有物品。她随后将房子转售给苏格兰国家信托基金，该处所也于1982年作为博物馆向公众开放。这是一个充满偶然与奇迹的故事——就像一只鸟的羽毛竟奇迹般地保存在暴龙的粪便化石中那样。这种事情本是不可预料的，但它却历经种种艰难与时间的无情侵蚀后，依然保存下了无比珍贵的事物。在20世纪上半叶，有数百万人生活在苏格兰的廉租公寓里，而托沃德小姐的人生经历便是其中之一；她的故事连同她的家具与个人物品一同被保存下来，流传到了我们手中。不过，还有她作为付款人、戏剧观众、写信人、食谱记录者，以及从事各种其他文字活动时所留下的记录，这些构成了她人生的痕迹。这让我意识到我们的历史是多么脆弱——通常被保存下来的只是政治领袖的事迹、战争记录、王朝更迭以及宏观经济趋势；而真正的历史，即构成社会的种种人类经历，却往往要等到为时已晚、无法挽回时才会被重视。上述的产权状况或许正是此处得以保存得如此完好的原因：由于这并非托沃德小姐的房产，她不愿在翻新上花费太多，直到1960年才安装了电灯。国家信托基金会在接手后拆除了这些电灯并恢复了原有的煤气照明，不过除此之外大概也没什么其他事情可做。如今，这座公寓仍保持着当年人们居住时的原貌——温馨、体面且舒适。整体装饰呈现出和谐统一的审美风格。底层的公寓已被改造成礼品店、咖啡馆以及展览空间，那里有以照片和文字为主的展示内容，能让参观者在登上二楼查看公寓之前，先对当时的社会背景有一个大致了解。虽然我无法评判这些展示内容的历史准确性，但它们确实有效地帮助人们体会那个时代人们的生活状态，并建立起与我们现代生活的某种联系。我年纪够大，见过使用煤气灯和固体燃料炉灶的房子，因此对我而言，托沃德小姐的生活或许比年轻人更容易产生共鸣。不过希望每一位访客都能真切感受到这里曾经存在过的生活气息。这里就是一个家——是由无数的选择、习惯与偶然事件共同塑造而成的，它就像陶艺师按在壶底的拇指印一般，将一个人深深烙印在了这个地方。这话听起来或许有些多愁善感。不过我认为，对于任何曾经经历过在挚爱之人离世后不得不收拾整理其遗物的人来说，这段话的道理都再清楚不过了。托沃德小姐如今仍住在租户之家，能去拜访她真是我的荣幸。
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