Sunday 14 January 2007

"I live in Trafalgar Square, four lions to guard me ..."

‘The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million,' says Henry James. That's a cunning little saw, don't you think? It seems to suggest that art requires a (what we might nowadays call) Heideggerean solidity and archictectural heft in order to accomodate its truth. But a million windows is actually a way of saying 'a house that is all window, nothing but window': in other words no house at all, just the open air. The house of art, in other words, is that place where tramps and vagrants live. And quite right too.

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