#door – @nickkahler on Tumblr

The boy raised the Bible and tore out a page with his teeth and began grinding it in his mouth, his eyes burning. ... The boy rose and picked up the Bible and started toward the hall with it. At the door he paused, a small black figure on the threshold of some dark apocalypse. 'The devil has you in his power,' he said in a jubilant voice and disappeared.

Flannery O’Connor, “The Lame Shall Enter First,” 1965

nickkahler

All at once his eyes became alert. Without warning the rain had stopped. The silence was heavy as if the downpour had been hushed by violence. He remained motionless, only his eyes turning. Into the silence came the distinct click of a key turning in the front door lock. The sound was a very deliberate one. It drew attention to itself and held it as if it were controlled more by a mind than by a hand.

Flannery O’Connor, “The Lame Shall Enter First,” 1965

nickkahler

New York was swishing and jamming one minute and dirty and dead the next. His daughter didn’t even live in a house. She lived in a building—the middle in a row of buildings all alike, all blackened-red and gray with rasp-mouthed people hanging out their windows looking at other windows and other people just like them looking back. Inside you could go up and you could go down and there were just halls that reminded you of tape measures strung out with a door every inch. He remembered he’d been dazed by the building the first week. He’d wake up expecting the halls to have changed in the night and he’d look out the door and there they stretched like dog runs. The streets were the same way. He wondered where he’d be if he walked to the end of one of them. One night he dreamed he did and ended at the end of the building—nowhere.

Flannery O’Connor, “The Geranium,” 1946

#flannery o'connor #quote #lit #literature #new york city #dirty #dead #swishing #jamming #building #house #dwelling #standard #generic #door #dazed #hall #night #dog runs #street #dream #nowhere

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subtilitas

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AFF Architekten & Stephan Hahn Architekt, House Lindetal, Mecklenburg, Germany, 2016 (via schink)

nickkahler

The particular character of fortified works does not appear with as much impact when one dwells in them. This character became vivid only when I was reviewing block 14 of the customs point at Greffern, which its occupants had deserted. When I had after much effort succeeded in opening the enormous iron door and had gone down into the concrete crypt, I found myself alone with the machine guns, the ventilators, the hand grenades, and the munitions, and I held my breath. Sometimes a drop of water would fall from the ceiling or the sector telephone would ring in various ways. It was only here that I recognized the place as the seat of cyclops who were expert in metal works but who do not have the inner eye, just as sometimes in museums you can ascertain the meaning of certain works more clearly than those craftsmen who made them and who used them at length. Thus was I, as if inside a pyramid or in the depths of catacombs, faced with the genius of time that I construed as an idol, without the animated reflection of technical finesse and whose enormous power I understood perfectly. Moreover, the extremely crushed and chelonian form of these constructions recall Aztec architecture, and not only superficially; what was there the sun is here the intellect and both are in contact with blood, with the powers of death.

Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel, 1924 (via virilio)

nickkahler

Tilting a little down the hill, as our house does, a breeze draws through the hall all the time, upslanting. A feather dropped near the front door will rise and brush along the ceiling, slanting backward, until it reaches the down-turning current at the back door: so with voices. As they enter the hall, they sound as if they were speaking out of the air about your head.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, 1930

#favorite #william faulkner #quote #lit #literature #hill #house #breeze #draw #hall #upslanting #feather #door #ceiling #current #voice #enter #air #head

nickkahler

There is a place at the centre of the World, between the zones of earth, sea, and sky, at the boundary of the three worlds. From here, whatever exists is seen, however far away, and every voice reaches listening ears. Rumour lives there, choosing a house for herself on a high mountain summit, adding innumerable entrances, a thousand openings, and no doors to bar the threshold. It is open night and day: and is all of sounding bronze. All rustles with noise, echoes voices, and repeats what is heard. There is no peace within: no silence anywhere. Yet there is no clamour, only the subdued murmur of voices, like the waves of the sea, if you hear them far off, or like the sound of distant thunder when Jupiter makes the dark clouds rumble. Crowds fill the hallways: a fickle populace comes and goes, and, mingling truth randomly with fiction, a thousand rumours wander, and confused words circulate. Of these, some fill idle ears with chatter, others carry tales, and the author adds something new to what is heard. Here is Credulity, here is rash Error, empty Delight, and alarming Fear, sudden Sedition, and Murmurings of doubtful origin. Rumour herself sees everything that happens in the heavens, throughout the ocean, and on land, and inquires about everything on earth.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, 8 CE