Francis Ponge's "The Pleasures of the Door" (translated by C.K. Williams)

Thoughts on door-making.

The Pleasures of the Door

translated by C.K. Williams 


     Kings never touch doors. 

      They’re not familiar with this happiness: to push, gently or roughly before you one of these great, friendly panels, to turn towards it to put it back in place—to hold a door in your arms. 

      The happiness of seizing one of these tall barriers to a room by the porcelain knob of its belly; this quick hand-to-hand, during which your progress slows for a moment, your eye opens up and your whole body adapts to its new apartment. 

     With a friendly hand you hold on a bit longer, before firmly pushing it back and shutting yourself in—of which you are agreeably assured by the click of the powerful, well-oiled latch.


from Selected Poems (Wake Forest University Press, 1994)

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This is one of my favorite first lines of any piece of writing I’ve read:

Kings never touch doors. 

Remarkable, isn’t it? It’s the kind of line that, when encountered in a poem, lodges itself in your head — as it has for me — and never leaves. It explains so much, and yet is merely — at its basest level — an observation. That’s all. An observation. Kings never touch doors. But then that observation expands — not necessarily in the poem, but in our minds, after and upon reading the poem. It expands and expands and expands. Kings never touch doors. Which means kings never open doors. Which is at once a literal statement and a metaphorical one. Kings never touch doors. But they destroy them, don’t they? And it’s not them literally doing the destroying, is it? It’s someone else. King’s orders. What do kings touch, then? And why is it all so far removed from what we touch? And what we feel?

All that from a sentence. Francis Ponge is a poet of observation and things. He once wrote, of soap:

Soap has much to say. May it say it with volubility, enthusiasm. When it has finished saying it, it no longer is.

And, of a simple crate, that thing used to transport fruit and so much else:

Halfway between crib and cage the French language puts crate, a simple slatted box for transporting those fruits that fall ill at the least lack of air.

Built in such a way that it can be broken down effortlessly after use, it is never used twice. It is really more perishable than the deliquescing foodstuffs that it carries.

Fucking awesome, right? Ponge is a poet who looks and articulates the observations inherent in such looking. And in such observation is a kind of enchantment, you know? The kind of enchantment that comes when you, as the French writer Georges Perec once wrote, “Question your tea spoons.”

There’s more to that quote, by the way. Prior to writing that, Perec wrote:

What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors,¹ we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why?

And so, poetry that seems to only be about seemingly simple observation is actually a poetry of questioning. And a poetry of questioning is a poetry of astonishment. And a poetry of astonishment is a poetry that refuses to accept that the world must be a certain way, which is to say, perhaps, a world where kings do not open doors, which is to say, perhaps, a world where kings must exist, which is to say, perhaps, a world where all people can enjoy the pleasure of a “friendly hand,” or “a door in your arms,” which is to say, not just a door, but the way, too, that a door can be a person, someone who says do you ever notice that or do you ever wonder if, someone who walks with you into a world you maybe could never have imagined and says hey, come look at this with me.

But look; I wanted to spend some time with this poem today because I wanted to spend some time with this line:

Kings never touch doors.

It is true that kings never touch doors. But artists do. People who make art touch doors all of the time. They touch the literal doors of this physical world. They take pictures of them, as my wife does obsessively and with a great, addictive joy. And they touch, too, the doors that they create, which they create all of the time. To be a writer is to be forever embroiled in the art of making doors. To write into a moment of one’s life is to open a door. To write into a character is to make out of that character a room that one has to open a door to walk into. To write into a place is to write a doorway first from which we can see that place. To write is to walk through doors by the sentence. And so, the work of writing is not the work of kings. To be a king is to grow more distant from the world in the hope of saving yourself. To be a writer is, among many things, to narrow the impossible-to-bridge gap between yourself and someone else, to make out of the unknown space between us something that is the opposite of distance, which is to say the opposite of loneliness.

I think I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been reading Elizabeth Strout’s Olive, Again, which I picked up after finishing Olive Kitteridge, which I picked up after finishing Anything Is Possible, which I picked up after finishing My Name Is Lucy Barton, which I picked up after finishing Lucy By the Sea. This happens, by the way. I read one book by someone and, upon loving it, I read every book by that same someone. It happened recently with Sarah Winman and with Alice McDermott and it happened long ago with Marilynne Robinson and Ali Smith and Denis Johnson and John Jeremiah Sullivan and Cormac McCarthy, and it happens always and forever with John McPhee.

Anyways, I’ve been thinking, in recent days, about what I love about Strout’s fiction. I love, in particular, Kitteridge as a character. She recurs — as does Lucy Barton — throughout a few of Strout’s books, and she is this woman of absolute multitudes. She is terse and radically honest. She is grouchy and aware of her grouchiness. She is judgmental and strong-willed and frustrating. And she is, too, capable of remarkable moments of understanding and compassion. She is capable of change, at times, in small ways, even as she seems capable of little to no change in bigger ways. But the change she exacts in small ways mean, in no small way, the world. Sometimes such small change explodes into something life changing. And she goes to bed, often and still, with a radio pressed close to her ear.

I don’t know what critics say about Strout’s work, but I’ve encountered a number of critical pieces lately in the world of fiction-criticism, and I thought, while reading Strout’s work, of the kind of fiction she writes, and why I’ve become enamored by it. I would describe it as a fiction of enrichment and enlargement, a fiction that goes on enlarging the lives of those it spends its time with. In Strout’s work, characters are never exactly who they seem to be at first, which is a trick she plays, and plays well, I think. We encounter her characters and meet them on the surface, in small towns and big cities, exhibiting behaviors we link to class or ignorance or something else. As such, we judge, briefly, before we are surprised by the depth of each character’s relation to the world — how they think and how they navigate the absurdity and beauty of their lives. This is, I’d say, a fiction of enrichment. It sees the world as it is seen at times — shallow, lacking — and then expands it. It pokes at our worser judgments and makes the case for better ones. It doesn’t do this explicitly. It does it by spending time with its characters, which is, I should say, an act of love.

This fiction of enrichment and enlargement isn’t limited to Strout. By no means. Consider Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy, a novel that hangs out with the margins of society, those cast off and beaten away. In that novel, one character, Harrogate, a strange vagabond sent to jail for even stranger reasons, ends up living under a sewer. He could be anyone in McCarthy’s eyes. He could be a page in a novel. But he ends up building out of his sewer a kind of palace of things forgotten and disused. He is hilarious and quick-witted and head-scratchy and strange. He is unforgettable. He has a soul, is what I mean. He has a soul because he someone has written his soul into the book.

Indeed, at one point in that novel, Suttree looks up at the sky, at a god who he is angered by, and says:

You have no right to represent people this way, he said. A man is all men. You have no right to your wretchedness.

It’s a fiction of enrichment that allows McCarthy to invest a character with such a voice, and it is a worldview of limitation and judgement and so much else that he is pushing against with such a voice.

In the world of education, which I’m thinking of because of the soon-to-come start date of the school year, we talk a lot about deficit mindsets. That’s a term, I believe, thrown around in the world of self-care — framed in such a way so that we are told not to have deficit mindsets about ourselves. But, in teaching, I consider how often we have deficit mindsets about our students. We say, frequently, they can’t do something, as if it is part of their character. We talk more about what students lack than what they have, which then positions teachers as fonts of knowledge, as saviors — pulling people out of their ignorance rather than reminding people of their agency.

Fiction can work in this way, too. The way we talk about people’s work can certainly work in this way, as well. We can say more about what people don’t have than what they do. We can turn lights off as we move through the world, intentionally or not. And so, I am thinking of all of that, and wondering about what it might mean to write a world that enlarges one’s senses rather than diminishes them. We certainly live in a world of diminishment, where those with power destruct from a distance.

In Olive, Again, Strout writes:

And it came to him then that it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect.

In such a moment, I think, there is not just compassion and empathy, but also a profound belief in the dignity of all people. A belief in the deep essentialness of each lived experience, that individual lives are lived lives, and that a lived life is a life that navigates a profound unknowing, whether one is aware of that unknowing or not, whether they ignore it or explore it or flee from it or run headlong into it, searching for the hands of others as they do. When a writer builds a door, I think, they look at the loneliness and say something like I’ll make a room. This is necessary work in a world where kings order the destruction of doors they never have the decency to touch.

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Some Notes:

1. I have found that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing great work in building solidarity and awareness and justice in this contemporary moment. You can find a list of their resources and areas of further support here. Please consider following and supporting the work of The Sameer Project (link here) and The Gaza Sunbirds (link here), as they provide on the ground support for Palestinians in Gaza.

2. My article for Outside Magazine, on what it takes to support someone as they run over a hundred miles through Death Valley, came out last week. You can read it here.

3. My novel, Pilgrims, has a cover, a release date, and a preorder link. It’ll be out November 18th. You can preorder it here. And the cover is below. For all of this, I am wildly grateful. This novel, which tells a story of monks and brothers and dogs and bread-makers and long roads, feels like a big chunk of myself. And I’d be honored if you read it.

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1. Except for kings, I should say.