There are houses which seem merely to contain the lives conducted within them, and there are others which appear, in some fashion difficult to define, to participate in those lives.
I do not mean haunted houses. At least, not necessarily.
The distinction is important.
A haunting presupposes an intruder: some intelligence, personality, or remnant thereof which has remained behind when, according to the ordinary economy of things, it ought to have departed. The house in such a case is merely the vessel. One might as easily haunt a railway station, a churchyard, or a room above a public house.
But an old house possesses another quality altogether.
Anyone who has lived for a sufficient time in such a place will understand what I mean. There comes a moment—usually at night, though not always—when one becomes conscious of the enormous quantity of human existence which has passed through the rooms surrounding him.
A door has been opened ten thousand times.
A stair has borne generations of feet.
Someone once stood at the window where you are standing and waited for a person who never came.
Someone received terrible news in the room where you now take your breakfast.
Someone laughed there.
Someone died there.
And afterward the furniture was moved, the wallpaper changed, the floor refinished, and another family arrived believing, as families invariably do, that the house had become theirs.
It had not.
We are inclined to think of houses as possessions because the law encourages us in this conceit. We purchase them, insure them, mortgage them, devise them by testament, and occasionally quarrel over them with remarkable ferocity. Yet these arrangements describe our relationship to a house only from the human point of view.
From the perspective of the house, if I may be permitted so fanciful an expression, the arrangement is quite different.
We arrive.
We remain for a little while.
We alter a room, plant a tree, scratch a mark into a doorframe, misplace something beneath a floorboard, and imagine that by these small acts we have imposed ourselves upon the place.
Then we depart.
Others arrive.
They paint over our colors. They remove our trees. They discover some object we had forgotten and speculate, usually incorrectly, about the person who left it there. In time, they too become no more than another obscure layer in the archaeology of the place.
And through all of it, the house remains.
Watching, if you are inclined toward fancy.
Absorbing, if you prefer a somewhat less anthropomorphic term.
Remembering, if you will permit me mine.
I am writing these words from within an old house. Around me are objects belonging to different generations, books written by men long dead, and walls that stood before anyone presently living had occasion to imagine me. Occasionally, particularly late at night when the modern world has finally exhausted itself and become quiet, the distinction between possessing an old house and merely occupying one becomes rather pronounced.
One begins to suspect that ownership is a temporary arrangement.
We come into these places, alter them slightly, leave something of ourselves behind, and eventually surrender them to strangers.
The house has seen all of this before.
And perhaps, long after it has forgotten our names, some small part of it will remember that we were here.
— John Francis Pike
Leave a comment