Tuesday, November 25, 2008

The Houses We Live In

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners [...] when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.
Virginia Woolf
A Room of One's Own

Having a fondness for spiders and all things "webby" I particularly like this quote I found today. Fiction is felted in with realty, the two cannot be seperated without destroying the whole. Reality is the sum of all the beautifully mundane things like going to the bathroom and looking in every pocket for your house keys. One's body is sometimes refered to as a temple or home- the place where the heart or soul resides. A person's casket or tomb can be thought of as their final house. I have often thought that a person's history/life story/body of work can, metaphorically, be thought of as that person's house. All the proof of where we come from, made of what we have been given and signs of our existance are the houses we have built of our lives. A part of Micheal Angelo resides in his paintings and sulptures. Old Bill Shakespeare is in his plays. Emily Dickenson resides in her deceptively simple poems and perhaps always did and no where else. The funny thing about these homes of the famous dead is they are empty now of all but furniture, old tableaus and echos. But what marvelous structures they are.

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