“Cottage for Rent,” “Rent to Own,” “Cottage for Sale”: I’m waiting for the signs to go up. Each will have a qualifier: “Newly remodeled five-bedroom home.”
Yeah, newly remodeled at a cost of $3.5 million. You read that correctly. Millions. Have you seen that place? Cottage? I suppose cottage is a relative term because a house with four bedrooms plus a nursery is smaller than a palace or castle.
What’s that you say? Oh! I thought Harry and Meghan were abandoning the place. Not for sale? They’re going to rent it as their “home base”? Well, at least, having been thrown out of the royal retinue, they won’t be homeless; they’ll always have a place to come back to. Whew! Another homeless problem solved.
The downside of Frogmore? It’s just two football fields from the public long walk. And you know what the public is like. Tempted to tread on royal property just to see the famous couple—or any resident—in their native setting, the public will live their inner anthropologist as they are driven to paparazzi-like selfie-obsessed action. “We just want to see how the natives live,” they’ll tell the guards.
So, the news force is out in force over a prince and his princess rejecting the shelter of the royal household. “We want to make it on our own,” they say. Not that they are building from the ground up. I mean, come on, I just saw a news clip of their socializing with the head of Disney, with the Prince pushing the voice-over skills of his bride. Nothing like bypassing HR and the typical application and interview process on the way to moviedom fame and lucrative gigs. Will the Prince apply for a job with the local ambulance service as a life-flight helicopter pilot? He’s qualified, you know.
I’m sure the couple will be able to pull off this separation thing successfully. They seem to be a bright duo, and they can always turn to the speakers’ circuit to talk about life in the royal family, its tribulations, and its rewards—for $50,000 per talk. And then the book deal and TV show based on the book will provide some income. I have no doubt about their survival. And I’m not envious. I wish them well, but I’m wondering whether or not I can rent Frogmore Cottage for a nominal fee, kind of like staying in a B&B, when the couple is cavorting around western Canada and Hollywood. It would be my small way of helping a young couple survive by defraying some of the rent on the cottage. In fact, maybe they should open up the cottage as a B&B during tourist seasons. Think of the cottage as a time-share.
I’ve often wondered about the drive in people to seek information about the lives of others, why, for example, people take tours to see where the “stars” live. I suppose I’m guilty of the same in a way. I’ve visited the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, the Breakers in Newport, and Viscaya in Miami. Of course, I didn’t go to see the long-gone residents, but rather to see the structure and its included artworks, those tapestries in the Biltmore, for example. And it’s not that I wish I could live in a home as large as those three buildings or Frogmore or Windsor. I surmise that no one can actually “live” in all those rooms and that any resident will eventually settle for the most part in just one or two of those rooms because we are, as you know, creatures of habit. Where, at home, do you spend most of your time?
So, if you learn that the Vanderbilts took their private train from New York City to Newport for a six-week stay at their “cottage” and that they took with them a retinue of twenty servants, will that mean anything for your life? In knowing that, will you live vicariously someone else’s life? Will you envision yourself at Great-Gatsby-like summer parties with the Vanderbilts? Of life with the Kennedys at private pools and on private sailboats?
And that brings me to thoughts of what role “vicarious living” plays in any life. Why, for example, do people buy those tabloids for sale next to the conveyor belt at the cashier in grocery stores? What’s to be gained? What do any of us gain by any vicarious living, be it through a TV show, a novel, or a tabloid article? Are we all unhappy at the core? Are we all caught up by an imagined life when we could be forging our own?
No, I’m not advocating anyone’s yielding to life in the status quo. As we can see by the Prince and the Princess, the status quo, even for wealthy aristocrats, has its downside. What is it that motivated the Prince and Princess to abandon a lifestyle that all those buyers of tabloids imagine living? Is there in them what lies in all? Is there an innate dissatisfaction with the status quo that says, “We need to remodel,” or “We need a change in scenery,” or even “We need to do something else with our lives because we can’t do the same thing without either becoming bored or vegetative”? Is there within each of us a desire, as Tennyson wrote in “Ulysses,” “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” In that line, the poet wasn’t advocating a vicarious life; he wasn’t saying, “Let’s strive, seek, and find through the lives of others.”*
You know that as you stand in the grocery store checkout line, you’re going to see those tabloid headlines. You’ll be tempted to read each one—though you might not pick up the tabloid for fear of judgment by the guy in the suit standing behind you. Sure, you can probably guess the stories on the inside of the magazine, and you can, if you want, do some vicarious living right there by the conveyor belt. But the line will move, the cashier will tally your expenditures, and you will have to pay the bill and cart the grocery bags to the car—unless, of course, your servants do all that for you.
And when you return home to your “cottage,” will you do anything that alters what you were?
*In another line of the poem, Tennyson has Ulysses say: “Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.”
Yeah, newly remodeled at a cost of $3.5 million. You read that correctly. Millions. Have you seen that place? Cottage? I suppose cottage is a relative term because a house with four bedrooms plus a nursery is smaller than a palace or castle.
What’s that you say? Oh! I thought Harry and Meghan were abandoning the place. Not for sale? They’re going to rent it as their “home base”? Well, at least, having been thrown out of the royal retinue, they won’t be homeless; they’ll always have a place to come back to. Whew! Another homeless problem solved.
The downside of Frogmore? It’s just two football fields from the public long walk. And you know what the public is like. Tempted to tread on royal property just to see the famous couple—or any resident—in their native setting, the public will live their inner anthropologist as they are driven to paparazzi-like selfie-obsessed action. “We just want to see how the natives live,” they’ll tell the guards.
So, the news force is out in force over a prince and his princess rejecting the shelter of the royal household. “We want to make it on our own,” they say. Not that they are building from the ground up. I mean, come on, I just saw a news clip of their socializing with the head of Disney, with the Prince pushing the voice-over skills of his bride. Nothing like bypassing HR and the typical application and interview process on the way to moviedom fame and lucrative gigs. Will the Prince apply for a job with the local ambulance service as a life-flight helicopter pilot? He’s qualified, you know.
I’m sure the couple will be able to pull off this separation thing successfully. They seem to be a bright duo, and they can always turn to the speakers’ circuit to talk about life in the royal family, its tribulations, and its rewards—for $50,000 per talk. And then the book deal and TV show based on the book will provide some income. I have no doubt about their survival. And I’m not envious. I wish them well, but I’m wondering whether or not I can rent Frogmore Cottage for a nominal fee, kind of like staying in a B&B, when the couple is cavorting around western Canada and Hollywood. It would be my small way of helping a young couple survive by defraying some of the rent on the cottage. In fact, maybe they should open up the cottage as a B&B during tourist seasons. Think of the cottage as a time-share.
I’ve often wondered about the drive in people to seek information about the lives of others, why, for example, people take tours to see where the “stars” live. I suppose I’m guilty of the same in a way. I’ve visited the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, the Breakers in Newport, and Viscaya in Miami. Of course, I didn’t go to see the long-gone residents, but rather to see the structure and its included artworks, those tapestries in the Biltmore, for example. And it’s not that I wish I could live in a home as large as those three buildings or Frogmore or Windsor. I surmise that no one can actually “live” in all those rooms and that any resident will eventually settle for the most part in just one or two of those rooms because we are, as you know, creatures of habit. Where, at home, do you spend most of your time?
So, if you learn that the Vanderbilts took their private train from New York City to Newport for a six-week stay at their “cottage” and that they took with them a retinue of twenty servants, will that mean anything for your life? In knowing that, will you live vicariously someone else’s life? Will you envision yourself at Great-Gatsby-like summer parties with the Vanderbilts? Of life with the Kennedys at private pools and on private sailboats?
And that brings me to thoughts of what role “vicarious living” plays in any life. Why, for example, do people buy those tabloids for sale next to the conveyor belt at the cashier in grocery stores? What’s to be gained? What do any of us gain by any vicarious living, be it through a TV show, a novel, or a tabloid article? Are we all unhappy at the core? Are we all caught up by an imagined life when we could be forging our own?
No, I’m not advocating anyone’s yielding to life in the status quo. As we can see by the Prince and the Princess, the status quo, even for wealthy aristocrats, has its downside. What is it that motivated the Prince and Princess to abandon a lifestyle that all those buyers of tabloids imagine living? Is there in them what lies in all? Is there an innate dissatisfaction with the status quo that says, “We need to remodel,” or “We need a change in scenery,” or even “We need to do something else with our lives because we can’t do the same thing without either becoming bored or vegetative”? Is there within each of us a desire, as Tennyson wrote in “Ulysses,” “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” In that line, the poet wasn’t advocating a vicarious life; he wasn’t saying, “Let’s strive, seek, and find through the lives of others.”*
You know that as you stand in the grocery store checkout line, you’re going to see those tabloid headlines. You’ll be tempted to read each one—though you might not pick up the tabloid for fear of judgment by the guy in the suit standing behind you. Sure, you can probably guess the stories on the inside of the magazine, and you can, if you want, do some vicarious living right there by the conveyor belt. But the line will move, the cashier will tally your expenditures, and you will have to pay the bill and cart the grocery bags to the car—unless, of course, your servants do all that for you.
And when you return home to your “cottage,” will you do anything that alters what you were?
*In another line of the poem, Tennyson has Ulysses say: “Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.”
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