Assumptions through lighting

Image from archiseek.com

I began reading ¨Dubliners¨ by James Joyce, and would like to share with you the first paragraph, where the main young character is looking at the priest´s window, day after day, trying to understand if he has died or not. The light through the window is the only element he has for his assumption.  Phenomenology and the architectural perception represented in the light, is part of the building´s architecture, in its minor scale: the window.

¨There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of the corpse. He had often said to me: I am not long for this world, and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softely to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.¨

DUBLINERS, by James Joyce. Page 9. USA, 1976.