What did a Turin officer find in 42 days inside one room?
Xavier de Maistre was confined to his Turin room for 42 days in 1790 and wrote a travel book about it. His method for a more exciting life: change how you look.
In this article4 sections
In 1790, an army officer in Turin was sent to his room for fighting an illegal duel. Xavier de Maistre, then 27, did not sulk. He wrote a travel book.
Voyage autour de ma chambre (published 1794, usually translated as A Journey Around My Room) recounts a forty-two-day trip across his own furniture. The quotable answer to “how do I make life more exciting?” is already in it: you can often get more novelty from looking differently than from going farther.
How is a 42-day trip taken inside one room?
By being strict about scale. I read the opening chapters in the French text on Project Gutenberg, and the book announces a voyage of forty-two days, then spends a whole chapter shrugging at why it was not forty-three. The room is thirty-six paces round. He sets off from a table toward a picture, drifts toward the door, and is waylaid by his armchair.
The book runs to 42 chapters, a neat bit of structure for a man who claims to follow no method. In chapter three he blames the whole arrangement on the duel, and jokes about the logic of honour that put him there.
Where does the excitement come from?
From attention, mostly. A small space becomes a country once you decide to describe it the way a traveller would, and a picture in the corner turns into a destination. Anyone short on French can start with the 1871 English edition shown by the Public Domain Review.
I read this as the same bet Kierkegaard made when he wrote about rotating your crops instead of your fields, which I looked at in the rotation method piece. And Georges Perec took the idea outdoors when he sat in a Paris square for three days, as this account of Saint-Sulpice describes. The opposite wager, maximum distance against a public clock, is the one a New York World reporter made in 1889.
Why does this suit an ordinary week?
Because most of us are not under house arrest, but we are under a quieter kind: the same commute, the same kitchen, the same shelf. A voyage around your room costs nothing, which de Maistre makes a selling point in chapter two. If you want the other direction, going out to share a night with other people, there is a different spin on one-off evenings in the once-in-a-lifetime hangout.
Mornings are a decent place to try it. With DontSnooze, the first act of the day is filming proof you are up, so you are already pointing a camera at your room; that is a free excuse to look at it properly.
Try it: a 10-minute voyage
- Choose one room and stay in it for ten minutes.
- Walk in zigzags and diagonals, with no destination.
- Describe one familiar object as a traveller who has just arrived.
- Write down the one thing you had never properly noticed.
De Maistre wrote a sequel, Expedition nocturne autour de ma chambre, decades later. The room, it seems, had more to give.