The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [30]
– I happen to know about the Cryptomeria tree, said Avery in the car somewhere in the September evening east of Kingston, because I've just been reading about temples, about the Ise temple in Japan. Two clearings lie next to each other in the midst of dense Cryptomeria; the forest itself is considered holy. One clearing is covered with shining white pebbles. In the other clearing stands the Ise temple. Every twenty years, for almost three millennia, the temple has been dismantled and burned and a new, identical temple erected in the clearing next to it. Then the empty site is covered in white pebbles and only a single post remains, hidden in a small wooden hut; this is the sacred pillar that will be used to rebuild the temple when its turn comes again, twenty years later. The temple is not considered a replica, instead it has been recreated. This distinction is essential. It is a Shinto belief that a temple must not be a monument but must live and die in nature, like all life, and continually be reborn in order to remain pure.
The fields glowed under the moon and the car was dark. Jean kept the window open and the night air on her bare legs was cold; she loved this cold, like being on the deck of a ship.
– Sometimes, Avery continued, when I'm looking at a building, I feel I know the architect's mind. Not only his technical choices, but more … as if I knew his soul. Well, no man can know the soul of another man – perhaps not his soul, but the state of his soul. I'm ashamed to say this, it sounds so simple-minded, but there are choices that strike me as so achingly personal, and there they are in stone and glass, for anyone to see … a man's mind laid bare in the positioning of each doorway and window, in the geometric relationship between windows and walls, in the relation between the musculature of a building to its skeleton, the consideration of how a man might feel, placing his chair here or there in a room following the light. I'm convinced we feel the stresses in a building when we're inside.
No one can take in a building all at once. It's like when we take a photograph – we're looking at only a few things, half a dozen or even a dozen – and yet the photo records everything in our frame of vision. And it's those thousand other details that anchor us far below what we consciously see. It's what we unconsciously see that gives us the feeling of familiarity with the mind behind a building. Sometimes it seems as if the architect had full knowledge of these thousand other details in his design, not just the different kinds of light possible across a stone facade, or across the floor, or filling the crevices of an ornament, but as if he knew just how the curtains would blow into the room through the open window and cause just that particular shadow and turn a certain page of a certain book at just that moment of the story, and that the dimness of the Sunday rain would compel the woman to rise from the table and draw the man's face to the warmth of her. It was as if the architect had anticipated every minute effect of weather, and of weather on memory, every combination of atmosphere, wind, and temperature, so that we are drawn to different parts of a room depending on the hour of day, the season, as if he could invent memory, create memory! And this embrace of every possibility, of light, weather, season – every calculation of climate – is also the awareness of every possibility of life, the life that is possible in such a building. And the sudden freedom of this is profound. It's like falling in love, the feeling that here, at last here, one can be one's self, and the true measure of one's life can be achieved – aspirations, the various kinds of desire – and that moral goodness and intellectual work are possible.