CHAPTER III 



UNBUILDING A BUILDING 



I tore down an old house recently, rent it part 

 from part with my own hands and a crowbar, 

 piling it in its constituents, bricks with bricks, 

 timber on timber, boards with boards. 



Any of us who dare love the iconoclast would 

 be one if we dared sufficiently, and in this work 

 I surely was an image-breaker, for the old house 

 was more than it seemed. To the careless passer, 

 it was a gray, bald, doddering old structure that 

 seemed trying to shrink into the ground, unten- 

 anted, unsightly, and forlorn. I know, having 

 analyzed it, that it was an image of New Eng- 

 land village life of the two centuries just gone, 

 a life even the images of which are passing, never 

 to return. 



As I knocked the old place down, it seemed 

 to grow up, more vivid as it passed from the 

 roadside of the visible to the realm of the remem- 

 bered. You may think you know a house by 

 living in it, but you do not ; you need to unbuild 



25 



