Gallery 734 of the Met

The Shakers worshipped in the simplicity of work, the celibate equality of male and female, and the ecstasy of form, their world an eternal classroom in which the whole of all retreats into millennial contemplation.  The lion having lain beside the lamb, the animal and sensual takes leave, and the celestial, the rational, and the humane are withal.

If I owned a home, I'd want its public rooms crowned with Shaker peg board, from which chairs could depend, beside a mirror and lamp.  But there would have to be life beneath.  A place where a cat could be, and the Shakers would never have kept a cat in these rooms, but only in their swept barns.

The walls of white, the drawers built in, the backs of chairs as straight as the projecting flue of the stove, itself low on its haunches and compact as a black piglet.  And nearby, ready to draw its warmth, a rocking chair with two-stepped stool, the better for propping a book on my knee or yours.  We'd sit silently, but together, and think the tunes of hymns, unsingably glorious.

Zwingli would have smiled to see those white walls, those silent saints, and thought of his own stripped church interiors in Amsterdam.  But then he'd hear the preaching of Sister Ann Lee, and blanch.

The bed is on wheels that do not pivot: it rolls only for ease of cleaning, not to be rearranged.  It is in its place, over floorboards of scrubbed maple.

The spools of thread adorn a crown of work, noble in wait, as pure spun as the three legs of the table beside, whose curves are so pure that they seem to descend beneath a buoyant top, like the tendrils of a jellyfish: in their form they reach down, rather than sustain over gravity, as do the four fine land-living legs holding up the crown of spools.