{"id":1523,"date":"2026-08-10T08:28:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T08:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/?p=1523"},"modified":"2026-08-14T20:40:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T20:40:00","slug":"the-rooms-we-choose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/?p=1523","title":{"rendered":"The Rooms We Choose"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There was something wonderfully ironic about finishing Edith Wharton\u2019s The House of Mirth<\/em> yesterday at the Del Mar horse track\u2026a place where, from the outside, one might imagine mirth is practically guaranteed. Stunning dresses and hats, flowing drinks, money changing hands, anticipation, spectacle, laughter, winning and losing, and plenty of people-watching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wharton would have had a field day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps that is why I have found myself increasingly drawn to her work. First, The Age of Innocence<\/em>; then, Madame de Treymes<\/em>; and now, The House of Mirth<\/em>. Wharton understood exquisitely the tension between the life we present and the life we inhabit. Her worlds are filled with stunning rooms, impeccable manners, and carefully observed social codes, yet she always seemed most interested in what lies beneath\u2026 the longing, compromise, judgment, restraint, and quiet negotiations we make to belong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What strikes me most about her writing is that she rarely condemns the beautiful room itself. She is far more interested in what we are willing to surrender to remain invited into it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mirth<\/em> means joy, laughter, and pleasure. Yet there is remarkably little genuine joy in the world of the main character, Lily Bart. There are elegant houses, exquisite clothes, elaborate dinners, money, status, and invitations to all the right rooms, but beneath the glitter lies something far less beautiful: transaction, loneliness, and the exhausting work of maintaining one\u2019s place in it all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wharton borrowed her title from Ecclesiastes: \u201cThe heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.\u201d<\/em> And somewhere between the horses running, a glass of tart white wine, a handful of kettle corn, and the turning of those final pages, the whole novel cracked open for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lily spends her life trying to remain inside the house where she has been taught happiness lives, while slowly discovering that happiness may never have lived there at all. Perhaps the most human part of her tragedy is that even as she begins to see through it, she still wants it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I recognized myself in that contradiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I certainly know some of my own rooms in Wharton\u2019s house\u2014the pull toward beautiful things and beautiful places, travel, experiences, achievement, even the desire to create a life that feels full and well-lived. I love beauty. I love a beautifully set table. I love going somewhere I have never been. I don\u2019t think there is anything inherently wrong with any of it. Quite the opposite. Beauty and experience can make a life extraordinarily rich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The danger, perhaps, begins when we ask them to prove that the life itself is meaningful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than a century after Wharton wrote about Lily Bart, we are still building our own idyllic houses of mirth\u2014achievement, money, beauty, travel, status, the perfectly curated life\u2014sometimes recognizing their limitations even as we desire them. We can become so busy arranging the rooms that we forget to ask whether we are actually happy inside them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe wisdom isn\u2019t refusing beautiful things. Maybe it\u2019s understanding what they can give us\u2014and what they cannot. Enjoy the rooms. Fill them with fresh flowers and beauty. Set the table and wear the dreamy dress. Go see the world. Even bet on the horse, but never confuse the house with the life lived inside it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps that is what keeps drawing me back to Wharton. Beneath all those beautiful surfaces, she keeps asking the same uncomfortable, remarkably modern question in different ways. For me, the question that keeps coming up is \u2026 When no one is looking, does the life you\u2019ve built merely look beautiful\u2014or does it feel beautiful from within?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up\u2026 Wharton\u2019s memoir, A Backward Glance<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this point, I\u2019m curious to see what else she has to say and what I might learn from a woman who, more than a century later, still makes me see the rooms around me differently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was something wonderfully ironic about finishing Edith Wharton\u2019s The House of Mirth yesterday at the Del Mar horse track\u2026a place where, from the outside, one might imagine mirth is practically guaranteed. Stunning dresses and hats, flowing drinks, money changing hands, anticipation, spectacle, laughter, winning and losing, and plenty of people-watching. Wharton would have had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1524,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72,39,62,71,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-identity","category-inspiration","category-reading-reviews","category-reflective-personal-narrative","category-women-of-strength"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1523"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1534,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1523\/revisions\/1534"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}