This is the house 스토리 팔로우하기

to J

I

This is the house of a thousand rooms; a thousand doors and a thousand locks through which I look searching for the clock. These are the corridors I wander daily, convinced that there is more than emptiness in this house.

II

That there is a window at the end of a corridor is a rare occurrence: an outside garden can be seen from the windows of the house, or is it inside? Looking through the locks and running down the corridors has come to confuse me: Do I see the garden from the house, or do I see the house from the garden?

III

Once the notion of time is lost, I begin to lose that of space: I do not know if I go upstairs when my feet are placed one above the other while I walk on an inclined plane; then the principle that gives meaning to the staircase of this house is lost. Cortázar would say that this episode could germinate more beautiful forms, but such a judgment does not elude the subject in question: Do I go up or down? At least I know I am certainly standing.

IV

How blissful it would be to return to the library of an uncertain floor. I have not read for a long time, but how much is long if I do not find the clock?

V

I used to count the hours following the sound of the pendulum that resonates through the walls of the house, but I fear the clock is shrewd and the sound no longer follows a sequence. The clock and the house seem to be allied. Can the pendulum be heard in the garden too?

VI

This corridor does not look like the other hundred I have crossed today.

VII

I turn to the right, walk, look at the locks, and suddenly it happens: I can hear the clock; It must be in one of the rooms of this corridor. I am not allowed to enter as many rooms as I please, so I must meditate on my choice; looking through the locks is an advantage of which I am grateful.

VIII

This is the house. These are the corridors through which a time passes—one cannot tell it but feel it—. Can time be felt outside the house? I have seen more than three hundred locks today, or have they been three hundred and sixteen?

IX

I hear it, and feel it closer. I am absorbed as soon as I look through the lock. I put my hand on the knob. I enter and discover the oscillation of the pendulum as I imagined it.

X

I look at the clock, astonished by the nature of a time different from the one in the corridors. I discover that the library, the window, and even the garden tree could well be about me, because I am nothing but a mere perception. I am and I exist depending on where I am looked from.

XI

I approach to the window and look at the garden just when the oscillation of the pendulum evokes the melody that kept me sane in my days in the corridors. Indeed, sanity is also a matter of perception. This is the house that can be seen from the outside garden.