By CB Adams
In the early morning yesterday, the Flaneur With A Camera stopped, did a U-turn and parked in front of this house, once someone’s (maybe even many somebodies’) home. The shadow/light on the face of the structure evoked something that compelled the Flaneur to photograph it. So it was the visual that attracted him, but so too was something he had read the day before in Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet: “The environment is the soul of things. Each thing has its own expression and this expression comes from outside it. Each thing is the intersection of three lines, and these three lines from the thing: a certain quality of material, the way in which we interpret it, and the environment it’s in.”
So what does this have to do with this house? It’s about the pediment over the door. This triangular gable crowns the front doorway, much likes its antecedents in classical Greek temple fronts. In this context, the pediment is modest, not ostentatious yet well-proportioned. Whoever designed this entrance (architect, builder?) understood the pediment and what is evokes. Without it, the structure is just a rectangular brick box. With it, it has dignity. The Flaneur imagines the owners feeling pride approaching this otherwise humble abode. It may not be a mansion (whose antecedents are the castles and manors of Europe), but it can have this one, powerful element from one. Or perhaps, it had dignity. Unless restored, it is a breath away from the wrecking ball.
So much life must have happened within the walls of this property. Now, one can only imagine the ghosts of those moments of life. Imagining ghosts is so less satisfying than driving by and seeing a child playing or the owner planting some flowers, the residents waving to their neighbors.
More then, from Pessoa: “Every dream is the same dream, for they’re all dreams.” The folk from this house dreamed perhaps this was their mansion, dreamed by the mansion-owners to be the home of landed gentry across the ocean, who dreamed they lived in the Parthenon. Who knows how far back this particular, pedimental dream extend, for it is a dream comprised of all the other dreams. Save the dream.