selfishness, he has taken it away.

The Wings of Stone

The preceding essay is about a half-built house upon my private horizon;
I wrote it sitting in a garden-chair; and as, though it was a week
ago, I have scarcely moved since then (to speak of), I do not see why
I should not go on writing about it. Strictly speaking, I have moved; I
have even walked across a field--a field of turf all fiery in our early
summer sunlight--and studied the early angular red skeleton which has
turned golden in the sun. It is odd that the skeleton of a house is
cheerful when the skeleton of a man is mournful, since we only see it
after the man is destroyed. At least, we think the skeleton is mournful;
the skeleton himself does not seem to think so. Anyhow, there is
something strangely primary and poetic about this sight of the
scaffolding and main lines of a human building; it is a pity there is
no scaffolding round a human baby. One seems to see domestic life as
the daring and ambitious thing that it is, when one looks at those open
staircases and empty chambers, those spirals of wind and open halls of
sky. Ibsen said that the art of domestic drama was merely to knock one
wall out of the four walls of a drawing-room. I find the drawing-room
even more impressive when all four walls are knocked out.

I have never understood what people mean by domesticity being tame; it
seems to me one of the wildest of adventures. But if you wish to see
how high and harsh and fantastic an adventure it is, consider only the
actual structure of a house itself. A man may march up in a rather bored
way to bed; but at least he is mounting to a height from which he could
kill himself. Every rich, silent, padded staircase, with banisters of
oak, stair-rods of brass, and busts and settees on every landing, every
such staircase is truly only an awful and naked ladder running up into
the Infinite to a deadly height. The millionaire who stumps up inside
the house is really doing the same thing as the tiler or roof-mender who
climbs up outside the house; they are both mounting up into the void.
They are both making an escalade of the intense inane. Each is a sort
of domestic mountaineer; he is reaching a point from which mere idle
falling will kill a man; and life is always worth living while men feel
that they may die.

I cannot understand people at present making such a fuss about flying
ships and aviation, when men ever since Stonehenge and the Pyramids
h