A Space Of One's Own

What's the word for a world only one person knows?

Is there a German word for an apparently disorganized space that only works for the one person who understands it?

I saved this drawing in my phone, a long time ago, of a cabin with a squirrel family in it—I guess it was from a children’s book, or something—and the picture showed this comfy, cluttered cabin stuffed with stuff. The person who shared it was saying he’d take that over the clean minimalism that’s in vogue in home decorating.

That idea of clutter as comforting, I kind of get it. I remember loving basements when I was a kid. They seemed full of nooks and crannies, hiding places. I remember the stack of 1980s tube TVs behind the staircase in my best friend’s basement, and the old Windows 95 computer, which was quite old even then. I kind of liked the idea of the basement as this indefinite containment area for stuff that wasn’t quite ready to go. Like a little condensed story of the family’s and the house’s history.

But I started with the idea of clutter that somebody knows their way around. That idea also came from a basement. My parents’ basement is unfinished, and is just used for storage and tools and things, including those things you have if you live in a house on a large lot: a kerosene and propane heater, a spare sump pump, stuff like that. (There’s a fine between having redundancy built in, and semi-believing the superstition of “I bought it, so I’ll never need it.”)

My dad not only knows his way around the basement, but has an organization scheme that is not necessarily apparent. But everything is in a place. It reminds me of something he said his uncle used to say: whenever someone new drives a car for the first time, something breaks. That’s really interesting. If I have my old distant relatives straight, this is the same uncle who scoffed at the peak oil thesis in the 1970s, which, if not wrong, was certainly…ahead of its time by quite awhile. There’s a kind of folk wisdom in that that’s part Archie Bunker and part a common sense that puts more weight on the concrete than the abstract.

But anyway, I guess the idea was, you drove your car a certain way, knew its quirks and dimensions, had a muscle memory for handling it without scratching or bumping the doors or front end. Maybe the way you held and pulled the implements even wore them in a certain way. It’s almost like this inanimate, mass-produced object slowly took on some characteristics of its own, like it became alive in some way that took after you. There is something spooky about tacit knowledge, about these little ways of knowing your way around a thing that can’t be distilled down to, say, a set of clear written directions. (That’s maybe what explains, for example, why it’s almost literally impossible to find a “real” version of a regional dish outside of its region of origin.)