Час в комнате Дикинсон

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What happens when a reporter for The New York Times spends one hour in Emily Dickinson’s former bedroom? Hear about Sarah Lyall’s experience and explore the room yourself in this 360 video.
 
By BENJAMIN NORMAN, SARAH LYALL, LOGAN JAFFE and JOSHUA THOMAS on Publish DateApril 29, 2017. 

AMHERST, Mass. — Does it matter where a writer lived? Can creativity and inspiration insinuate themselves into a physical space, somehow becoming part of the atmosphere? Do you believe in ghosts?
It’s impossible not to think about these things when you visit the Emily Dickinson Museum, which includes the house where Dickinson spent most of her outwardly uneventful life, her fierce mind raging away, quietly producing her profound and enigmatic poetry. Perhaps more than most writers, Dickinson is closely associated with one spot. You can’t really separate the poet from the house.
On a recent afternoon, I found myself all alone in Dickinson’s bedroom, having paid $100 for the chance to spend an hour there. (The price has now increased; people can also pay for two hours or to go in with a friend.) It was one of those days. I’d arrived by train and cab from New York, my nerves a little jangly, my head buzzing, fretting about being late, compulsively checking my phone. And now here I was, in a place redolent of a long-ago past, trying to corral my thoughts, my pencil poised over a blank page in my notebook.
Because Dickinson spent so much time and was so productive here, the room has particular resonance for scholars and lovers of her poetry. Several dozen people have worked (or perhaps just sat) alone in it for an hour or two since last July, when the museum began offering the private visits, said Brooke Steinhauser, the program director. They tend to arrive with a great passion for the poet and to leave with a new understanding of her place in their lives.

 “I wanted to see what it would be like to spend some time in that room,” said Lanette Ward, 70, a retired English teacher from Atlanta who admires Dickinson so much she named her daughter Emily. She wrote there for two hours late one afternoon, as day turned to evening and a replica of one of Dickinson’s famous white dresses, displayed in the room, began to take on special significance.
“I wanted to see what it would be like to spend some time in that room,” said Lanette Ward, 70, a retired English teacher from Atlanta who admires Dickinson so much she named her daughter Emily. She wrote there for two hours late one afternoon, as day turned to evening and a replica of one of Dickinson’s famous white dresses, displayed in the room, began to take on special significance.
“Oh, yes, I felt closer to her,” Ms. Ward said by phone later. “It felt magical to me, like being in an Emily Dickinson high holy place.” She hadn’t planned to write anything in particular, but what emerged, she said, were the beginnings of “a story of magical realism, very Southern Gothic, something about the dress being animated and beginning to move.”
Maria Arenas, a 20-year-old student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, visited the room on Dec. 2 as a surprise birthday present from her family. Her father drove up to town to collect her.
“He was very mysterious about it,” Ms. Arenas said. “He didn’t say where he was taking me, and then he handed me a little bag when we got to the center of Amherst with this notebook and a pack of pencils.”
Installed in her spot, she let her mind wander and found Dickinson invading her thoughts. “I started writing whatever came out,” she said. “I ended up writing a short story about a fish. It was very interesting.”

To prepare myself for the experience, I wandered through the house, which is being restored to the way it looked, more or less, when Dickinson lived there until her death in 1886. The bedroom is back to its old state, though several pieces of furniture, like the bureau and the tiny writing desk that was so important to Dickinson’s work, are reproductions. (The originals are owned by Harvard.) For some reason, Dickinson’s single bed, made of a lovely dark wood, seemed particularly poignant and evocative.
Snippets from Dickinson’s poems are scattered throughout the house, and I read a few — “A chilly Peace infests the Grass” and “I dwell in Possibility” — to get into the mood.
Pretty much everyone else had left the house, and I was alone on the second floor. The sound of people rustling downstairs began to recede along with the noises from outside, as what passes for rush hour in Amherst came and went. The light was changing, and already I was feeling different.
Even if you’re lucky enough to have a room of your own, as Virginia Woolf put it in her elegant manifesto, and this applies as much to male as to female writers, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to suppress the cacophony in your head. It’s hard to find a calm spot for clear thinking. I’d arrived with an unquiet mind — there was a tricky project at work, and an even trickier personal situation. Having left my bags with their comforting electronic devices in another room, all I had at my disposal were some pencils I’d borrowed from the museum office, a couple of Dickinson poems and my notebook.
Barbara Dana, an actress and Emily Dickinson scholar who toured the country for four and a half years in the one-woman play “The Belle of Amherst,” spent two hours in the room in September, working on a memoir about a difficult time in her life. She said it helped cement a closeness she had long felt for the poet. What she hadn’t been prepared for, though, was how moved she would floor.
“This is going to sound weird,” said Ms. Dana, who is 76. “I felt her very strongly there. I started working. I told her, this memoir is hard for me to do. I said it out loud, very quietly, ‘I need your help.’ And as I was writing I felt her support, and I thought, we’re both writers. I had never allowed myself to think that before.”
I arrived knowing far less about Dickinson than Ms. Dana does. I planned to absorb the atmosphere and maybe meditate a little, to try to imagine the room in the 19th century. My notebook was meant merely to record my observations.
I read a Dickinson poem aloud, in a murmur, trying to fall into its cadences and absorb its meaning. I closed my eyes. I was so tired.
What happened next is also going to sound weird.
A calm came over me, and I was overtaken by a sharp distilled focus that expressed itself, bizarrely, in a compulsion to write. I did something I hadn’t done since elementary school, and never of my own accord: I began to compose a poem. What came out wasn’t very good, but it wasn’t terrible, and that wasn’t really the point anyway. The point was that it just poured out of me, this surge of emotion and language. I was expressing myself in a whole new way.
The thoughts spilled out in order and did not step over each other. I didn’t stop to think. I didn’t stop writing until Ms. Steinhauser came in an hour later and told me it was time to go. It felt thrilling. It felt uncanny. It felt as if no time had passed at all.