Chapter Two Hundred and Ninety-Nine: The Eighth Section

He began the eighth section on a Saturday morning in July.

He had cleared the drawing board the evening before. He had taken down the seven pencil studies and filed them in the flat drawer and cleaned the board surface and set out the large cartridge paper — larger than the section paper, the paper for the drawing that was not a section in the usual sense, the paper for the drawing that had not yet been drawn.

He stood at the board in the Saturday morning light. He thought about the eighth section. He thought about what it was — the drawing of the building as the correspondence between its rooms, the section that showed the attending person not one room from the inside but all the rooms in their relation. He thought about the form of this drawing. He thought about the section as always the inside view — the building cut, the interior revealed, the attending person's position honoured in the drawing. He thought about the eighth section as the inside view of the whole building — the building cut not once but along the attending person's path, the cut following the movement rather than the wall.

He thought: the eighth section is the section cut along the attending path.

He drew the attending path first. He drew it lightly in pencil — the line of the attending person moving through the city library from the entrance to the reading room to the children's corner to the local history room, the path as the drawing's organising line. He drew the path as the horizontal datum of the eighth section — not the floor, the path, the attending person's movement as the ground from which the drawing rose.

He thought about the path. He thought about the attending person arriving at the library — the entrance, the threshold between the city and the library. He thought about the threshold as the beginning of the attending path — the moment the attending person crossed from the outside to the inside, the moment the library began to hold the attending. He drew the entrance threshold as the section's starting point: the door, the inside face of the door, the library beginning.

He drew the entrance hall. He drew it in section along the path — the ceiling height at the entrance, the floor, the first view of the library's interior that the arriving person received. He thought about the first view as the library's introduction of itself — the building presenting its attending conditions to the arriving person before the attending had begun. He thought about the first view as the question the honest building asked: which room are you today?

He drew the staircase. The path from the entrance to the first floor — the attending person in motion between the ground floor's simultaneous conditions and the upper floors' more specific attendings. He drew the staircase as the path's most critical moment — the choice point, the place where the attending person decided which floor and which room and which attending condition the day required.

He thought: the staircase is the eighth section's hatch. The staircase is the threshold between conditions.

He thought about the staircase as the hatch — the threshold that made the choosing possible, the opening between the attending conditions, the place where the attending person was neither in one room nor another but between them, the between-time of the attending path. He thought about the community centre hatch and the coastal school corridor and the village hall covered porch and all the thresholds the practice had drawn — and he thought about the staircase as the city library's threshold, the between-condition space at the building's centre.

He drew the staircase with the care he had given to the community centre hatch. He drew it as the section's most important element — the threshold that organised the whole building's correspondence between rooms, the place where the attending person made the choice that the honest building prepared them to make.

He drew the reading room on the third floor. He drew it in section along the path — the double doors, the threshold, the room opening. He drew the reader at the desk. He drew the west glazing with the division line. He drew the three faithful readers. He drew the reading room in the eighth section as the section's deepest attending — the furthest point of the attending path, the room the most sustained attending arrived at.

He drew connections. He drew the path between the local history room and the reading room — the attending person who needed the local history room's quiet and then needed the reading room's space, the path between the two sustained attendings. He drew the path between the children's corner and the large general reading area — the child who arrived with the parent and moved from the children's corner to the larger space as the attending developed. He drew these paths not as corridors but as the attending lines — the lines of the movement between conditions.

He drew for the full morning. The eighth section emerging in pencil across the large cartridge paper — the attending path as the organising line, the rooms along the path in their section conditions, the staircase as the threshold, the connections between the conditions drawn as the attending lines.

At noon he put down the pencil and looked at the drawing.

The eighth section. The city library drawn not as seven separate rooms but as the building the attending person moved through — the building as the sequence of conditions, the correspondence between the rooms visible in the drawing as the paths and the thresholds and the choices. He looked at the drawing and thought about all the previous sections: the coastal classroom and the community centre and the village hall, each drawn from the inside of one condition. He thought about the eighth section as the drawing from the inside of the whole building — the inside view not of the room but of the attending journey.

He thought: the eighth section is the section of the attending journey, not the section of the attending room.

He thought about the attending journey as the practice's newest correspondence — the correspondence not between the room and the attending person but between the attending person and the building as a whole, the movement through the building as the attending, the building as the sequence of the attending person's needs across the day.

He wrote in the pocket notebook: the eighth section begun — Saturday July. The section cut along the attending path, not the wall. The path as the organising line, the attending person's movement as the drawing's datum. The staircase as the hatch — the threshold between attending conditions, the choice point. The reading room as the deepest attending — the furthest point of the path. The attending lines between conditions: local history to reading room, children's corner to large area. The eighth section is the section of the attending journey. The building drawn from the inside of the whole.

He photographed the pencil drawing and sent it to Thomas that afternoon. He wrote: the eighth section is the section of the attending journey — the building drawn as the path the attending person takes through it. The staircase is the building's hatch, the threshold between conditions. I have drawn the attending lines between rooms. Tell me if the paths are correct. Tell me which rooms you see the attending people move between and in what order. The eighth section waits for your attending observation.

He was glad.

End of Chapter Two Hundred and Ninety-Nine