“You live in one of the end units, this is going to cost you $50,000,” the man with the clipboard said to me as I sat down at the board meeting. I felt the familiar tingle of resistance rising, the old thrill of a born troublemaker on the scent of a just cause.

As much as I liked to think of myself as a beach bum, the truth was that we lived exactly two hundred steps from a Ritz-Carlton in a gated compound of three buildings, well-tended, constantly tweaked condominiums. Seasonal plants were put in and pulled out, the pool was vacuumed of bugs and spores and human effluvia. And that meant that occasionally a condominium board sat at a long table facing us, the owners. This was by no means the lovably cranky and power-crazed board of Seinfeld’s Del Boca Vista, this was a serious group of North Florida neighbors. They were nice people devoted to rules, their faces now closed tight like living clams.

At issue were our leaky windows. They were sub-standard, not up to code, allowing the penetration of the elements. The board had brought in one of their experts who outlined a plan to replace every one of the 777 windows and the 210 sliding doors. It cost $4.5 million. At this number, I felt a shifting of unease around me as a chill crawled over all those frugal Protestant bones.

We had all, especially those of us who actually lived there, been through two years of work—our roof replaced, the entire outside sealed and repainted, our terraces and parapet walls resurfaced, the long halls leading to the apartments covered in tile. For two years, dawn to dusk, there were men crawling up and down the buildings, platforms rising and falling by my terrace and windows to find me in various states of dishabille. I’d be in my undies sweeping some sand and I’d hear the creaking of the lifts rising with the sun and I’d dive down, crawling for shelter as the workmen were hoisted past our floor. There were men on the roof, men by the pool so that we were living with the constant presence of strangers, the sense of intrusion. These men, hard at work in the blazing heat, were a certain challenge to the residents and renters swinging out their doors with their tennis rackets and golf bags, their beach chairs and coolers and buckets of toys. They loomed over those of us lying prone, slick with sun block or still stroking on dangerous unguents. They destroyed our pervading sense of unreality. The work was done and then it was redone and then it was redone again. Now the new windows and sliders would mean at least a year more of disruption.

Immediately I felt my primal nature reemerge, the horror of rules which had caused me to systematically break every rule in my college handbook. A shudder ran through me at being told what to do, and I was not alone. No, around me I sensed the polite shifting and sideways glances of real opposition. This was the moment just like that in the garden of the Palais Royale on July 14 in the summer of 1789, when the journalist Camille Desmoulins said “Citizens if we would save our lives, we must fly to arms.” Now was the time for the crowd to strip the leaves from the trees and, wearing the color of hope, head for the Bastille. Or at least to the parking lot for a tete-a-tete with the dissidents of the militant wing.

The man I was sitting next to, the man in a white polo shirt and khaki pants who was holding tight to his clipboard was our own Desmoulins. We would throw the tyrants out. We would revolt—our weapons the clipboard, the chart and the petition as our Bill of Rights. We would question authority (“How many windows did you check?”) We were the defenders of J.J. Rousseau’s idea of general happiness. My fellow citoyens were a democratic group, a careful group, a thrifty lot like me who might buy the occasional Blumarine dress but who also rolled pennies. (They, however, did not ever buy the Blumarine dress).

The owners came from the Midwest, they were engineers, they knew about caulking and replacing parts. They knew about doing studies. They were the very core of American enterprise.

I was still, thanks to Kimie, in my ancient Japanese mindset, valuing the beauty of nature and the imperfect—the old, the worn, the failing and falling apart. In months to come, I would return to New York and see the lacquer masterworks of the 19^th century artist Shibata Zeshin. He would paint his boxes with lacquer to look like rosewood and then paint on a crack and then add a patch so that the box would look like it had been lovingly repaired over time. He valued the torn leaf, the broken feather, he would “[improve] the natural blemishes of the material with his own deliberately carved defects.” In a thirty- three stage process, he would create the red or black lacquer ground, apply increasingly fine grades of lacquer mixed with different powders, polish the surface with increasingly abrasive stones and, finally, with powdered staghorn and oil. And then he would paint on the flaws.

He would make a scabbard look like a branch of rotting ivory or he would mimic a surface of rusty iron. This is what I had studied with yugen. They called it iki here—meaning chic, cool, elegant restraint. Leaky windows! But of course Zeshin was a man who understood. On the wall of the Japan Society exhibit it quoted him: “If you decide to enter the world of the arts you must expect to put up with a few hardships.” And if you live on the beach on a barrier island you just might have salt corrosion, warped floors, and leaky windows. And hurricanes and tornadoes and sand blowing under the doors and howling winds that lash the palms dry and humid air that bows the flowers and the occasional, gigantic, creatively-named palmetto bug strolling across the counter.

Rousseau, who inspired the leaders of the French Revolution, believed in the Social Contract. We needed a condo board to reflect the general will, not dictate to it in the manner of the last Bourbon kings. There now were cabals, angry emails, wounded feelings, elevator silences. I, a veteran of feuds, hurts, and disputes, at last felt right at home.

In time, we overthrew the entire condo board and replaced it with our fellows, our heroes with clipboards. I felt very good about this. Not only had Edward and I adjusted to this place, we had prevailed, we had made it adjust to us. The people on the other side of the Ritz in the more expensive condos, who were facing an assessment of $189,000, were agog at our daring.

This was the triumph of the Natural Man, the Savage Man armed with a caulking gun. Man living in nature did not need to be ruled; he should be left alone to live and die free. We embraced Rousseau’s warning that love of self would lead us to four consequences:

Competition

Comparing oneself with others

Hatred

The urge for power

All the things that defined life in the city. In other words, to replace the windows in a huge project meant giving in to New York thinking. It meant being like those who perfected and tweaked, lacquered without imperfections, silver- leafed, marbleized their many million dollar caves and summer caves.

Rousseau, driven half-mad after real and imaginary persecutions, withdrew from society and spent his later years in seclusion. For his last six weeks, he went off to a chateau and slumped down, amid nature, in a beautiful garden that was the exact vision of his writing.

I learned from our citoyen leader that there was another way to do things: deliberately, politely but firmly. The quiet voice, the slow but inexorable revolution of Ocean Place was the way, going with the rip until I could swim out and return to shore. It was bloodless and effective. I did not have to hurl myself at problems as I had in the past. Unfortunately, this put me on the opposite side of the barricades from Kimie and her husband, longtime veterans of Hawaiian condominiums. She felt I had no understanding of the communal spirit of condo life. Probably she was right.