Thursday 4 February 2021

fainting couch

With due deference to one of the greatest historical armchair adventurers and confinement veterans Xavier de Maistre, we quite enjoyed this thoughtful and thoroughgoing essay from Hunter Dukes on the postures of transportation and how cushion and cortege and increasing sophistication in seating and upholstery parallels literary conventions and enabled one to truly escape one’s surroundings and mentally travel to new worlds. Consider that one popular design for a chaise longue was an asymmetrical day-bed called le Mรฉridienne, a sloping affair made for a mid-day rest. Like a modern gaming chair, one’s sedentary comforts influence and inform one’s imagination and engagement and a gauge of one’s willingness to let the world come to them. Much more from Public Domain Review at the link above.