Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Learning from Disaster
After my recent apartment fire i have had an opportunity to reflect. I realized that I was selling myself short by having an apartment where I wasn't fully settled, where I didn't feel I really lived. When I refurnish my new apartment I will furnish it better and make it into even a more ideal work space--and insure it this time. Perhaps I didn't have renter's insurance because I had the habit of not keeping anything expensive or valuable there. As I gradually acquired a few nicer things over the past few years I didn't change my attitude toward the place, and hence did not purchase insurance.
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2 comments:
My favorite remark about learning from disaster is in Hemingway's 1958 Paris Review interview: "Certainly it is valuable for a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly."
Sorry for the loss, Jonathan.
Interesting that the lesson seems to be to invest yourself more in the home. (I wonder sometimes about the long-ago owners of the place where I live: their big house burned down in the earthquake/fire of 1906, so they built three row houses on the same property. Three wooden houses, with no foundations. You at least are planning to do something differently.)
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