A great granite statue of the Sphnix gazing out to the breathtaking view of the sea.
WHEN I visited Agnes Keith House in Sandakan, Sabah, a few years ago with my journalism trainer, we both were amazed by not only the magnificent view of Sandakan harbour from the finest hilltop in Borneo but also inspired by the thoughts Agnes had for her home.
What really is there to see of a person’s home? A kitchen, a bedroom, a study room, a living room – like any of our homes. But Agnes Keith, the American writer living in Sandakan with her English husband between 1934 and 1952, left her most beautiful daily thoughts in her house which has been restored and turned into a museum by the Department of Sabah Museum as a tribute to her.
She said of her study room: “There is a mental energy in this room, discharged and accumulated from the past, which seems to exhilarate you when you enter it. Not only is it a good place to work in but it is a good place to stop while the bathwater runs or when dressing for dinner or waiting for breakfast, for there is always something unfinished to be gone on with there.”
And it’s an even more beautiful description of her bedroom: “The bedroom is the next place of importance. Like a ship, berthed by a high tide, our bed stands in the middle of our bedroom floor. All the other pieces of furniture have washed away from it to the outer edges of the room, where they will not intercept any breeze. We made our bed and we certainly like to lie in it. Six-foot-six both ways it is, made of Borneo heavy timber.”
This is Agnes Keith House in Sandakan. It’s so daily, yet beautiful.
One other place that I find fascinating and captivating is Capri Island. I remember a friend cautioning light-heartedly don’t go there – you are not going to want to come home when I mentioned to him that my trip to Italy would include spellbinding Capri.
I knew I would fall in love with this idyllic island on Italy’s Gulf of Naples, whose natural beauty has drawn gatherings, ranging from Roman emperors to 21st century luminaries.
Capri was a honeymoon destination for Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis and his bride, Jacqueline Kennedy; a playground for screen goddesses Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren; a magnet for many artists and writers. Today’s see-and-be-seen crowd includes Harrison Ford, Julia Roberts and supermodel Naomi Campbell.
While in Italy, I did enjoy strolling through Capri’s narrow streets and stopping at the piazzeta for a cuppa as Jackie did – minus big sunglasses though. Jackie started wearing sunglasses because she was told “they are not only useful for hiding under but also for studying people without their realising it.”
But it was not Jackie’s footsteps that fascinated me but rather, the enchanting Isle of Capri which is made up of two towns – one taking after the island’s name, the other called Anacapri (Upper Capri). And it was Anacapri that lifted my spirit as I explored the facts and fantasies of Villa San Michele.
The Swedish physician Axel Munthe came to Capri for a brief visit in 1875 and fell in love with it. He did go back but a decade later moved to the village of Anacapri and built the Villa San Michele on the crest of a hill with a stunning view of the Mediterranean.
It is not a residence in the ordinary meaning of the word. It is rather the bearer of Axel Munthe’s thoughts and feelings about beauty, his struggle with his eyesight problem and the great questions of life but, at the same time, it is open for personal interpretation.
Munthe travelled to Naples during the cholera outbreak of 1884 and would have lost count of the mounting corpses of the poor in the epidemic, and that would have made him see life differently.
Munthe wanted to make a home “open to the sun and wind and the voice of the sea, like a Greek temple, and light, light, light everywhere.”
But Munthe had a lifelong eyesight problem – the brightness of Anacapri was, in fact, a torture to him for the 40 years he lived there.
But life is daily. With a whole garden full of thousands of polished slabs and pavements, Munthe had to make darker glasses for his eyes.
He built the villa by eye without an architect but I noted an architect’s plans in the house’s archives although I am not able to verify if he told a lie in his book.
He had a great granite statue of the sphinx gazing out to the breathtaking view of the sea, harbour and cliffs at the garden’s outermost point.
He was a doctor who refused money from the poor but made his money from the rich and famous who usually paid more than enough to cover the fees of the impoverished. One of his most illustrious patients was Crown Princess Victoria, later queen of Sweden.
It is a normal house for daily living too.
Munthe wrote of his kitchen: “Young Maria ruled the kitchen. The household also included the sisters Giovannina and Rosina whom I taught to read and write. Giovannina and Rosina belonged to the San Michele household, better servants I have never had, light of hand and foot, singing the whole day at their work.”
I stood before a sculpture on a loggia, looking into its eye, and then moved to lean by the kitchen bench, trying to hum a song like happy Maria even with a floor mat with a picture of a skeleton serving food at the dining room still fresh in my mind.
I stared at the surface of a table, covered with a slab of multi-coloured marble which Munthue exchanged with Sicilian washerwomen for a modern washboard – to the women’s delight. There were thoughts and stories everywhere in a house for daily living.
While reminiscing such memorable moments, my thoughts flashed back to an invitation The Borneo Post extended to Chief Minister designate Tan Sri Adenan Satem to its journalists’ appreciation lunch just before the close of the year 2013.
At the table, we struck up a conversation. Adenan said something that made me felt the same – life is a daily thing.
“It’s a daily thing for journalists to fill up many pages and it’s incredible how we do it, yet maintaining our independence and adherence to the facts,” he marvelled.
Later in his speech, he said: “You have become not just a newspaper; you have become an institution which is more than a newspaper. You have established yourself in the consciousness of the reader and that is no mean achievement in light of the challenges you have overcome all these years.”
The then Special Functions Minister who is a former journalist noted that over the years when there was controversy, sparked especially by political rivalry and rhetoric, it became more and more difficult to be truthful and factual and not to take sides.
We can choose to view the hardest thing about life as it being so daily with daily tests that come like a flash bringing more than a brief crash. It can bruise us.
But, we can also choose to trust in the Almighty’s wisdom that the dailyness of living makes life deeper, more meaningful and thought-provoking – like turning the daily pages of a newspaper into an institution, and handling each piece of news with conscience and fairness.
It is not easy but as difficult as Munthe beating his vision problem in the bright sun of Capri daily. But he understood, above all, from his own troubled eyesight that in a place of such brightness, colour and light, the riddle more than ever involves the dark.
He did not want museumry, he wanted life and thoughts in his home – the storyteller, the doctor, the animal lover, the architect living his daily life, bringing sky into his house and turning me towards a new horizon.