Attic

Photo: Bianca Battaglia, “The Guitar”.

The most beautiful experience we can have
is the mysterious.
It is the fundamental emotion that stands at
the cradle of true art and true science.

Einstein, A. (1935). The world as I see it. John Lane the Bodley Head.

The important thing is to not stop questioning.
Curiosity has its own reason for existence.
One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates
the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.
It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day.

Einstein, A (1955). Old man’s advice to youth: never lose a holy curiosity. Life magazine.

Mystery.

In our architecture, in our experiences, in our lives…we see it seems less and less of it.
Think though of the domestic attic…

You lower the folding ladder to poke your head above the ceiling, and the smell of wood, paper and dust makes your nostrils retract. The dust here, it is solid and liquid and gas at once, motes of it seething in the scant beams of sunlight. It smothers everything lightly, that dust, this stuff, all these burdensome things, each one of them stained with stories but all of them mute as a talisman. These boxes, cases and chests, each one is a mystery, each one of them a history, each an invitation to a story or a question or a memory.

You approach without specific questions, but with a sense of curiosity. There might be something interesting in here and so you pull down the first case, perch it perhaps on that chair you pull into the solid/liquid/gas of light. The snaps give way, the lid hinges upward, you catch a glimpse of a journal, the yellowed shine of an old photo, and then the questions begin to form, and the stories your uncle told you about people and times you’ll never know, they become your stories.

They achieve a poignancy no book could ever bestow and a relevance previously unimagined. That space, that mystery, that sense of discovery as you open the trunk, that darkness, that totem, that story finally your story.

Could we find in school a space for mystery?