"A miserable quiet stable of lame." From a young age, every year we are subliminally trained for predetermined living conditions: lousy ones, though "full of heavenly glory" for solace. Maybe that's why soaking in the squeeze goes with us for generations.
Two for the price of one. It's great when a history book turns out at the same time to be a handbook for dealing with so-called modern times. The work "Life in a peasant hut" by Kamil Janicki just fell into my hands. A book with a key. Seemingly, the author documents the standard of living of our peasant ancestors, seemingly describes their huts, customs and superstitions, and actually sets the course of action. How many descriptions here, or actually recipes for one's own dwelling close to modern standards! When the no longer so new, but still so democratic government shows consistency in not implementing the housing policy, we get a seemingly historical description, and at the same time an instruction: how to glue together a place to live. In accordance with both tradition and the latest trends: with wood, wood and more wood. And also straw, clay, moss and whatever else the wind blows and the magpies bring us. Zero cement, nails in homeopathic quantities. On top of that, tiny windows, square footage that would not be ashamed of a patkavalera. An energy footprint so negative that it is close to absolute zero. Especially since in one room with a stove annex nested a father, mother, numerous children and about ten kilos of bacteria. Sometimes the cattle also lived in this chamber, today decently replaced by a growing herd of dogs.
Such a cottage is therefore not only a song of the past, but also an ideal model to follow. It meets many of the standards to which we are again accustomed, while helping to bypass the developer, the government and other benefactors. You don't need a building permit, because both the square footage is lousy, and it's not really construction, but just a sticking. The permit for sticking hasn't formally made it into the construction law yet, although if you look at some residential houses, it's already hula in practice. It will be a great ploy when the ban on the construction of single-family houses, recently promoted in fiction, comes into force.
In the meantime, cottage piecing is off the index for now. More: maybe they will be subsidized by some open-air museum, because, as we read in "Life...", only better, ornate, more spacious cottages have survived to our times in these ethnographic reserves. In short: far from the norm prevailing until the 19th century. By forging a dwelling for ourselves, we will fill in the gaps in the museum's collection.
Janicki - perhaps unintentionally, but who knows? - has thus succeeded in creating an ambiguous story. He doesn't get into the preacher's trepidation that is profitable today. He doesn't beat into our heads with a whip about what to do and what not to do in the face of one impending doom. He seems to couch us in humble, low-key cottage life. Discreetly and with tact. In the fashion of communist writers, under the guise of an ethnographic story, he smuggles content between the lines. Who likes to have a whip put to the head? So we read Janicki and parallels come to mind. Behold, "Life..." provides many accounts of how a cottage, especially a newly erected one, was a sanctuary of all lichen. Before settling in, they had to be magically chased out of the cottage, sometimes resorting to bloody and at the same time broth-creating actions (how, you can read for yourself). Where's the parallel? Today, this is also done, but in installments. After thirty years of bloodletting, the specter of an unpaid mortgage disappears with a bang and, once the stench of sulfur is dispelled, one can enter old age stress-free. When someone wants to break with this fresh, but ingrained in social circulation credit tradition, demands some TBS and other housing at a normal price, immediately a chorus of uncles hoots at him: how can you, credit was, is and will be, you have to work hard, without it you lose the purpose of life, become lazy, and in your spare time, God forbid, start thinking. I'm not confabulating. Recently someone important said something along these lines, I even made a note of who, I just sowed the notes somewhere.
And here again with our times rhymes Janicki's work. Every so many pages he reports how the peasants, though they already could, did not want to change anything. More chambers? Seemingly convenient, but no. Brick houses? We read that when the peasants got just such, they quickly demolished them and returned to wooden ones. Reaping grain with a scythe? After all, there is a sickle. A plow? Socha! It won't do, because it's never been done that way. In short: tradition.
A fascinating case is the story recalled in "Life..." the story of the father of the family, who a century ago forbade his exasperated daughters to replace the threshing floor with a wooden floor, which these village emancipators had earned themselves. He was pecking away at this grandfather even when they went on their own and put the planks they had accumulated earlier on this one. It's as if I'm hearing experts and commentators reaching their sixties, who are now demanding that the next generation make sacrifices, give up simplifications, facilities and civilized rules, because they themselves harried themselves into drudgery.
"Why should you have it better, when I didn't have it either?" - sounds this refrain of the experts. On top of that, it sounds false, because not a few caught on to the transformational bonus unavailable today. He happened to be young, had a paper with the word "diploma" in his hand, a nerve and a lot of time. "Untainted by the People's Republic of Poland," he was intercepted and pampered by the capital flowing into Poland, despite obvious shortcomings in competence. He made up for it with enthusiasm and ass-hours and, contrary to today, had reason to believe in a better future. He bought an apartment, cheap and comfortable by today's standards. He fails to see that the world is elsewhere, and - if we review his tirades well - wishes his successors as many disappointments as he himself experienced. Thanks to Janicki's book, we know that this is basically nothing new. A tradition. However, it needs to be enriched. So I'll add something of my own to the found collection in the climate: I wish everyone the Same New Year (as my previous one).
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