Imminent Domain

“It isn't going to be what we expected. It is old and little, and altogether delightful--red brick. From hall you go right or left into dining-room or drawing-room. Hall itself is practically a room. You open another door in it, and there are the stairs going up in a sort of tunnel to the first-floor. Three bed-rooms in a row there, and three attics in a row above. That isn't all the house really, but it's all that one notices--nine windows as you look up from the front garden.”

When E.M. Forster wrote these words in Howards End, he understood the central importance constructions of brick and wood have in our lives. Houses construct meaning. The house in Forster’s novel is built by the people who live in it, but the house builds the people as well—it shapes their perceptions of what is “safe,” what is “stable,” and what is “home.” A house, as Forster suggests, can become a touchstone for wealth and happiness, providing a standard by which we compare our lives with others’. The windows through which we gaze out into the world are always framed, and those frames are part of a threshold of experience we create, protect, and invest with time and energy.

What Forster’s novel doesn’t show is a house composed by the hospitality and humanity of the people within it: a house that welcomes, befriends, comforts, and heals. Maybe Forster never saw a house of this construction in his day, but they must have existed. You can’t recognize a building of this type by its drawing-rooms or dining-rooms or red bricks; it can only be experienced in relationship with its people, for the house becomes an extension of the human desire to belong and connect.

For months we have been looking for our “dream house,” and we have been slow to realize that our dreams really don’t depend at all on the shape or size of a building. Days after this epiphany struck us, a nice little house with a big yard came up for sale close to campus. We put an offer down within three hours of the listing.

So we buy a house on Friday, and our thoughts and prayers frame our hope for the house to become a space of belonging and connection.

“Only connect.” –E.M. Forster, Howards End