Tor House, Hearst Castle

Back then, I’d never heard of Robinson Jeffers. My friend told us he was a famous poet and Tor House was where he lived with his family for much of his life. Definitely a stop worth making on the mini California road trip he was taking me and my wife on. The house, a rough-hewn stone cottage nestled in a motley English country garden, sat on top of a bluff overlooking the Pacific. The interior was marked by a collection of 3,000 books and a kind of gaunt homeyness that spoke of a very different definition of happiness. Next to the house, in the same small plot of land, was Hawk Tower, about 2 floors of granite boulders one stacked upon another, which the poet spent 4 years building by himself, a magical retreat for his wife and children. I climbed the circular staircase that ran along the wall inside the tower. Sitting on the stone bench in the little lookout at the top, I gazed at the whitecaps dotting the sapphire expanse of the ocean, and was struck by how sparse this way of life must have been, and how unencumbered a spirit it would have taken to recognize the riches it held. After the monastic beauty of Tor House, Hearst Castle was a temple to a very unambiguous god. An immense Assembly Room and an equally vast Refectory (living room and dining room to lesser mortals), each hung with the most ornate tapestries and topped by a carved ceiling that would put many cathedrals to shame, over 50 bedrooms of gilded Baroque splendor, 3 separate guesthouses, a private zoo, the fabled Neptune Pool and Roman Pool, fit for Caesars. At one point, having led us onto a second-floor balcony, the guide told us that everything we were looking out at, every inch of land, every tree, every blade of grass, all the way to the horizon, used to belong to the Hearst family. It was wealth at its most unapologetic, something mere numbers, however high, could not have conveyed. At the end of the tour, my friend and I, having just witnessed the difference between living and owning, between subtracting and adding, were wondering aloud which property we’d rather call home. This was about a quarter of a century ago, before all of life’s hard lessons had sunk in, when we still had in us, if not the conscientious idealist, at least a little of the self-conscious romantic. So Tor House was declared the unanimous winner. Now, I’m not so sure. Life has a way of instilling in us a humility that lets us aspire to only a tycoon’s palace rather than a poet’s tiny paradise.