A while back I read the book Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. I liked very much and I often recommend it. The book follows its main character, Piranesi, as he navigates life as the sole inhabitant of a seemingly endless, cathedral-like building.

Throughout human history, we've often compared our mind, or consciousness, to the most complex and impressive thing we can imagine — in the megalomaniac spirit so typical of our species. These days the brain, or consciousness, is sometimes likened to a supercomputer. But in earlier times, the comparison was drawn from that era's own great achievements: the castle, the cathedral.

I've always sensed, intuitively, that there's something to this architectural comparison. I find it far harder to picture the human interior as a computer. There's something about the idea of spatiality — bounded places you can leave and return to. The feeling of vastness. The feeling of being someone walking around inside myself, observing thoughts and processes. In the comparison of the supercomputer, there is no observer. The computer itself is you.

As a child, I went on a school trip to France. We visited Versailles, and as we walked through the Hall of Mirrors, I was struck by a sudden feeling of déjà vu — stronger and more intense than anything I'd experienced before. I could see myself as a noblewoman who had once spent time there long ago. I could sense the smell of chalky old makeup. Old paper. Linen.

For a long time, I thought this was some kind of memory from a past life. And that my past as a noblewoman in France would explain some of my neurotic (but fabulous) traits. But maybe Versailles hit me so hard because I recognized something of my own interior? The spatiality that lies beyond the blindness of the everyday ego. The very structure that makes me who I am, where thoughts are just one of several things moving in the shadows within.

Lately I've been revisiting rooms inside myself that I haven't entered in a long time. Places I thought I'd locked the door to. Cluttered spaces, with narrow little windows set high along the walls, where the light streams in thin shafts — like a basement in summer.

They're not happy places. But they're spaces that are part of me, and revisiting them brings a strange sense of homecoming. In rare moments, I've also stood on the great balcony of my inner cathedral, looking out into the vast, sacred emptiness that lies beyond.

When the time comes for me to move out of my cathedral, I'm certain that's where I'll have to go. But until then, I walk around in here. Among the rubble and old statues.

Love,
CM