Le Petit Hameau

Before we start the next chapter in our journey, we must first close off the present one. Yesterday our suburban home in Markham was listed on the market. Here are some of the official "portraits" for the occaision.

I find it difficult to get sentimental about about a building, but we did enjoy our time at this home. We welcomed our daughter into the world while living here. We enjoyed the company of good friends. I also learned a good deal about small scale intensive gardening at this house. Overall, I think we will have fond memories from this home. Alas, all things come to an end, and our lives in suburban Markham is now coming to an end.

Now we just need to sell the place!

A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. - Aristotle, Poetics


When Aristotle wrote of the essential components of a tragedy, he properly identified that every story must start somewhere. As he thought it, the beginning, or the incentive moment, does not follow from anything by causal necessity. In the case of our story, either Aristotle has it wrong in that every beginning is born from a previous chain of events, or we aren't actually at the beginning any more. Maybe it is a bit of both.

Let's step back for a minute and frame the story. I have chosen the title of the story - "Le Petit Hameau" - as both an indicator of where we are going, and as a declaration of the guiding principle for the journey. Precisely translated, Le Petit Hameau can be read as The Little Hamlet, the historical reference being the small "hamlet" created for Marie Antoinette on the grounds of the Palais Versailles. It was originally designed by Richard Mique as an amusement farm for the Queen who was fond of playing shepherdess with her maidens amongst the quaint and artificially picturesque buildings. It was a true ferme ornee in fashion with nobles at the time.

To actually see the Petit Hameau on the grounds of Versailles is a touch surreal. In contrast to the sheer luxury and flamboyance of the palace, the irregular and imperfect rural buildings seem almost ludicrous. Add to that the historical context (imagine Marie Antoinette dressed as a shepherdess, sipping tea with her maidens while Paris was starving) and you have a very unique and very poignant symbol.

A strange and artificially crafted setting, drawing upon idealized forms and imagery, within which the rich play poor and an attempt to escape the realities of a world gone wrong.


It is in this sense that Le Petit Hameau serves as a guide for our journey.

Not so long ago we, as a couple and as a young family, decided that our lives were to take a different direction. We found ourselves as both benefactor and victim of our modern society, a society characterized by mass consumption, chemical saturation, oil dependency and a general lack of vision. Our concern over environmental problems and economic maelstroms led is to conclude that the present course could not be maintained and a change was needed. The key, we concluded, was self-sufficiency.

Now, I realize that this conjures up images of either:

a) the impoverished sustenance farmer;
b) the crazed survivalist clutching his shotgun and his string-beans;
or c) the granola eating, tree hugging, Birkenstock wearing neo-hippie;

You would be right and wrong with all three. My idea of self-sufficiency has more to do with reducing dependency on a poisonous system than it does with necessity (a), paranoia (b) or lofty ideals (c). For us, self sufficiency means reducing our dependency on the life support mechanisms provided by the current economic infrastructure.

For instance, take a look at your average suburban home (like the one we are currently selling). It is connected to a network of life support mechanisms: electricity, natural gas, water, and waste removal. Without any one of those mechanisms in place, the house ceases to function as a viable, life sustaining environment. We would require to venture forth into a larger (public) sphere to compensate for the loss of any of these. For example, if your water were cut off for an extended time, you would need to venture out to secure potable water for drinking, and clean water for hygiene. Sure you could trap rainwater from your roof and boil it, but the average home is built with asphalt shingles which are known to leach toxins and chemicals that might not make you sick, but I wouldn't want to risk it. Lose the electricity or the gas during the winter and you better make sure you have a good sleeping bag.

Our modern urban homes, and indeed our modern urban lives, are sustained by the economic engine that surrounds us. Yes, it does bring us a great deal of benefits, such as advanced medical care, entertainment, tools for making everyday tasks easy, transportation, communication, etc. When I refer to self-sufficiency and off-grid I am not talking about a Mennonite existence. What most don't realize is that most of the inputs into your life come from an exterior source. What we are proposing to do is to bring as many of those inputs as possible into a more immediate relationship.


Immediate is used here in a sense that some may not be familiar with. A relationship between two things can be said to be immediate when there are no external forces acting upon that relationship. The relationship between your respiratory system and the air around you would be a good example of an immediate relationship. However, the relationship between your brain and the air around you is mediated by your respiratory system; in other words, without your lungs, all the oxygen in the world isn't going to save your brain.

Obviously most of our relationships are, by definition or necessity, mediated by another force or process. It comes down to a measure of degree really. Contrast the act of cupping your hands into a pool of water and drinking with popping a coin into a machine which dispenses a plastic bottle with imported French water. Which is more immediate?

The more mediated a relationship becomes, the more alienated we are from the original object. In the case of the bottled water, we are almost completely alienated from the water in the sense that a vast, intricate, and completely alien (to us) series of processes has brought that water to us. This alien infrastructure is usually transparent, often contradictory to our well-being (eg. private companies draining municipal water systems), and not always having our best interest at heart (water quality or leaching plastics for instance). A similar situation can be found with almost all of the "inputs" in our lives: gasoline, food, entertainment, clothing, just to name a few.

If we took the time to examine the degree of alienation found in every relationship we have with every object in our lives, it would be mentally and emotionally exhausting. Our lives have become so much easier, but they are far from simpler. By easier, I mean the sheer amount of manual labour we have shed from our (historical) lives is immense. This does not mean that it is better, just less physically taxing. But could you seriously argue that our lives are simpler? I think that we take on the one hand (opening a box instead of cooking from scratch), while we give on the other (computers, power tools, and have you ever looked under the hood of a modern car?).

So a very critical component to becoming more self-sufficient is simplification. We can now see that a chief goal of self-sufficiency is reducing our alienation from the processes and objects that sustain our lives, and that the practical implication is simplifying those processes and objects so that they are more immediate to us.

To take us back to where we began, the idea of the Petit Hameau at Versailles serves to me as reminder of simultaneously how to and how not to move forward on the journey to self-sufficiency. The Petit Hameau was as alienated from the reality of rural life in France as you could imagine. It took all of the physical realities and the processes of that rural life, abstracted from them all substance and meaning and idealized them into a purified and contrived reality. Marie Antoinette was no doubt drawn to the simplicity of it all, as a way to escape the oppressive reality of the French royal court.

Our journey is not motivated by escapism. If it were, we are definitely going about it the wrong way. Our society offers up escapes at every glance: drugs, Hollywood, consumption, etc. These escapes are as hollow and as contrived as Marie Antoinette's ornamental farm. No, our goal is to construct a reality for us where relations, processes, objects and people are less alien to us, more immediate. All of this is to be crafted within the framework of the greater modern environment. We can no more escape society than the Petit Hameau can escape the grounds and history of the palace.


You will recall, for Aristotle the beginning of every story does not follow from anything by causal necessity - the causes exist, but are unimportant for the integrity of the whole (the plot). I think then we were indeed wrong: this isn't the beginning of our story. We are somewhere in the middle, or as Churchill once said "this is not the beginning of the end. But perhaps we are at the end of the beginning." I don't really mind either way, because I take a great deal of comfort knowing that the foundation for the story has been laid, solidly, and we are ready to continue writing the chapters. The ending may not be what any of us expected, but that is not for us to say now. If Aristotle was right, the ending will fall into place nicely. And I suspect that that will be merely the starting point for another story.

Here's hoping we aren't writing a tragedy! :-)