Chapter Three Hundred: The Correspondence

Thomas's answer came in August.

He read it at the drawing board on a Thursday morning — the August morning, the fullest light, the long days not yet shortening. He read it slowly, the way he read the letters that carried the most weight.

Thomas wrote about the attending paths. He wrote that the paths in the eighth section were mostly correct — the path from the entrance to the reading room, the path from the children's corner to the large area, the path from the local history room to the reading room. He confirmed each attending line. He wrote: these are the paths I have watched for eleven years. You have drawn them correctly.

He thought about eleven years of the paths and the eighth section drawing them correctly. He thought about Thomas watching the attending people move through the library for eleven years — the patient watching, the accumulated observation, the correspondence that had been building in Thomas before he wrote the first letter. He thought about the eighth section as the drawing of Thomas's eleven years of watching.

He thought: the eighth section is the drawing of the librarian's attending.

Thomas wrote about one path the eighth section had not drawn. He wrote that the most common path in the library was not between the rooms but from any room to the window seat on the first floor landing — the window seat that overlooked the street, the seat that no one had designed, the window seat that had appeared when a renovation left a wide sill at sitting height beside the landing window. He wrote that people used this seat between rooms — not as a destination but as the between-time of the attending journey, the resting place between one attending condition and the next. He wrote: the window seat on the landing is the library's bench. It is what the community centre's south bench is to the coastal classroom. It is the threshold attending in the urban library.

He thought about the window seat on the landing as the library's bench. He thought about the south bench in the coastal classroom — the threshold between the east window and the corner, the lit crossing, the bench for the moving child. He thought about the community centre's bench outside on the south face — the between-time bench, the bench between the gathering and the field. He thought about the window seat on the landing as the attending person's pause between conditions — the place where the attending person who had left one room and not yet arrived at the next could rest, could look at the street, could be between the two conditions in the correct way.

He thought: every honest building has its bench. The bench is the between-time of the attending journey.

He thought about the bench in every honest building — not the community centre bench alone, every honest building. He thought about the three-generation house and whether it had its bench. He thought about the library extension and the coastal school and the village hall and whether each had its threshold, its between-condition resting place, its bench. He thought about the bench as the element the practice had drawn in some buildings and not others — the community centre with the south bench outside and the coastal classroom with the south bench inside and the village hall not yet with a bench.

He thought: the village hall has no bench. The village hall needs its bench.

He wrote this in the pocket notebook and then put it aside. He would write to Catherine. He would return to the village hall correspondence. But not today — today was Thomas's letter and the eighth section and the window seat on the landing.

He wrote to Thomas: the window seat on the landing. I had not drawn it. The library's bench — the between-time of the attending journey. I will add it to the eighth section. And Thomas — you have given me something beyond the city library. You have shown me that every honest building has its bench. I have drawn the bench in some buildings. I have not drawn it in others. The bench is the element I have been drawing without knowing it was the element. The practice will not draw a building without attending to its bench from now on.

He put the letter down and sat with it.

He thought about the bench as the practice's newest constant — not the specific bench of each building but the bench as the condition, the threshold attending, the between-time of the attending journey that every honest building needed to hold. He thought about the bench across all the buildings: the community centre south bench and the coastal classroom south bench and the window seat on the library landing and the three-generation house — he thought about the three-generation house and searched his memory for the bench. He remembered: the grandmother's window seat. The window seat at the grandmother's window on the south face, the low sill, the seat-height sill, the grandmother between her room and the garden view. The three-generation house had its bench. He had drawn it without knowing it was the bench.

He thought: the first building had its bench. The practice has always drawn the bench.

He thought about this with the fullness of the August Thursday morning light on the drawing board. He thought about the bench as the practice's oldest drawing — the first building, the grandmother's window seat, the between-time of the attending journey drawn before the practice had a word for it. He thought about the twelve years of the correspondence and the fifteen notebooks and all the sections and the buildings and at the origin of all of it the grandmother's window seat on the south face of the first building.

He thought: the practice began with the bench.

He picked up the pocket notebook. He wrote slowly: August Thursday. Thomas's letter — the window seat on the landing, the library's bench. Every honest building has its bench. The bench is the between-time of the attending journey. The three-generation house had the grandmother's window seat — the first building had the bench. The practice has always drawn the bench. Now the practice knows it is drawing the bench. The knowing makes the drawing more honest.

He thought about the knowing making the drawing more honest. He thought about the practice across twelve years drawing the honest conditions without always knowing it was drawing them — the bench and the threshold and the attending path and the section from the attending person outward. He thought about the knowing as the correspondence's gift — the correspondents giving the practice the words for what it had been doing, the vocabulary arriving after the drawing, the understanding following the attending.

He thought: the practice attends first and understands after. The correspondence gives the understanding.

He thought about all the correspondents who had given the practice its understanding — Raymond and Margaret and Ellie and Joseph and the girl and Helen and Thomas and Catherine and the two women on the kitchen committee and the seven-year-old and the five-year-old and all the others. He thought about all of them as the practice's understanding — the understanding not in the practice but in the correspondence, the understanding distributed across all the attending people who had given the practice their vocabulary and their observation and their eleven years of watching.

He thought: the understanding is not in the practice. The understanding is the correspondence.

He sat with this for a long time. The August morning light moved across the drawing board as he sat. He looked at the eighth section on the board — the attending path and the staircase as the hatch and the rooms along the path and the attending lines between conditions. He thought about adding the window seat on the landing — the bench in the eighth section, the between-time of the attending journey made visible in the drawing.

He picked up the pencil. He drew the window seat on the landing — the sill at sitting height, the window above, the street below in the peripheral, the attending person between conditions resting at the correct place. He drew it with care. He drew it as the section's most essential element — not the reading room with the diffusing west glazing and not the children's corner with the lower ceiling and the reaching shelves, but the window seat on the landing, the bench, the between-time of the whole building's attending journey.

He thought: the bench is always the section's most essential element.

He looked at the eighth section with the window seat added. The city library drawn as the attending journey — the entrance and the staircase and the rooms and the attending lines and now the window seat on the landing, the bench between all the conditions, the resting place in the middle of the whole correspondence.

He thought about all the buildings the practice would draw from now on. He thought about the next letter waiting and the next attending not yet attended to and the next first honest line not yet drawn. He thought about every future building having its bench drawn from the beginning — not found by accident as the library's window seat had been found, not accumulated over forty years as the village hall's covered porch had accumulated, but drawn in the section from the first attending visit, the bench as the given element of every honest building.

He thought: from now on the practice attends to the bench first.

He wrote to Thomas a second letter that afternoon. He wrote: I have added the window seat to the eighth section. The bench is in the drawing. The city library's eighth section is complete in pencil. I will draw it in ink when you confirm the window seat. And Thomas — eleven years of watching have given the practice its newest constant. The bench will be in every section from now on. Not the last thing drawn but the first. The attending journey needs its bench before anything else is placed.

He wrote in the pocket notebook at the end of the Thursday: the bench as the practice's newest constant. Every honest building has its bench. From now on the bench is drawn first. The attending journey needs its bench before anything else. The eighth section complete with the window seat. The city library correspondence approaching the ink. The understanding is not in the practice — the understanding is the correspondence. August Thursday. The bench first.

He looked at the eighteenth section on the drawing board — the attending path and the staircase and the rooms and the attending lines and the window seat on the landing, the bench at the centre of the whole building's correspondence.

He thought about the grandmother's window seat in the first building and the community centre south bench and the coastal classroom south bench and the library landing window seat and all the benches the practice would draw from now on. He thought about the bench as the practice's oldest and newest drawing — the first drawing and the future drawing, the drawing the practice had always been making and would now make knowingly.

He thought about the next letter. He thought about the next attending person who would write to the practice with their eleven years of watching or their three months of thinking or their one morning's observation. He thought about the next vocabulary not yet given and the next inside view not yet drawn and the next bench not yet attended to.

He thought: the correspondence is not finished.

He thought: the correspondence is never finished.

He thought: this is the correct condition.

He was, in the full weight of the August Thursday morning and the eighth section on the board and the bench drawn and the grandmother's window seat in the first building and Thomas's eleven years and the girl at the dark window waiting for the colour to go and Raymond waiting for the January sun line and the two women on the kitchen committee who had felt cut off and all the attending people in all the honest buildings and all the sections and all the pocket notebooks and the correspondence that was the understanding and the understanding that was the correspondence and the bench first and the next letter waiting, glad.

He was glad.

End of Chapter Three Hundred