Live as they will together a husband and wife give each other many a sidelong glance at unlikely moments. Each watches the other out of the tail of his eye. Always it seems some drunkeness is waiting to unite them. First one then the other empties some carafe of spirits forgetting that two lumps of earth are neither wiser nor sadder.… A man watches his wife clean house. He is filled with knowledge by his wife’s exertions. This is incomprehensible to her. Knowing she will never understand his excitement he consoles himself with the thought of art.
3
The pretension of these doors to broach or to conclude our pursuits, our meetings,—of these papered walls to separate our thoughts of impossible tomorrows and these ceilings—that are a jest at shelter.… It is laughter gone mad—of a holiday—that has frozen into this—what shall I say? Call it, this house of ours, the crystal itself of laughter, thus peaked and faceted.
It is a popular superstition that a house is somehow the possession of the man who lives in it. But a house has no relation whatever to anything but itself. The architect feels the rhythm of the house drawing his mind into opaque partitions in which doors appear, then windows and so on until out of the vague or clearcut mind of the architect the ill-built or deftly-built house has been empowered to draw stone and timbers into a foreappointed focus. If one shut the door of a house he is to that extent a carpenter.
Coda
Outside, the north wind, coming and passing, swelling and dying, lifts the frozen sand drives it arattle against the lidless windows and we my dear sit stroking the cat stroking the cat and smiling sleepily, prrrrr.
A house is sometimes wine. It is more than a skin. The young pair listen attentively to the roar of the weather. The blustering cold takes on the shape of a destructive presence. They loosen their imaginations. The house seems protecting them. They relax gradually as though in the keep of a benevolent protector. Thus the house becomes a wine which has drugged them out of their senses.