Room and Bell III

Room and Bell III

Room and Bell III

A bland, small room—nothing about it accounts for the feelings
that it lodged in me. Not the built-in wardrobe, the pine desk
under the window, not the two shelves lined with books above
my bed, not the high window which remade weather as a
moving picture—I have set out the furniture as it would appear
to someone standing in the doorway, looking clockwise, though
in my memory, the room builds itself out from where I sit in bed,
first as the presence, there, in front me, of a rectangle of light,
then as the consciousness of that light’s shadow on the wall
behind me. This moment, I know the room not as a place, not
even as a memory, but as though some ghost of the future had
whispered in my ear, ‘Here you are’, and permitted me to
glimpse, this moment, the room as it will be when it exists only
by my haunting. This trick of memory, this O, which builds itself
out of fragments, out of a structure of shadows, in which I can
no longer distinguish between memories and objects, in which
the very door handle and skirting boards, as they assume their
shapes, appear to me still in the unreal light of that first
moment—it is by this that I enter into the dream that a place is
mine.