Chapter Two Hundred and Sixty-Two: Joseph's Answer

Joseph answered in ten days.

He had expected to wait longer. He had expected the teacher's considered answer — the long thinking, the arriving with the thoughts already in order. Joseph's answer came on a Wednesday, ten days after the letter, in the morning post.

He read it at the drawing board with the pencil bench study pinned above him and the coastal section in ink beside it.

Joseph wrote: yes. The third child exists. He wrote that he had known this and not had the word for it — the child who came to the east window at the beginning of the day and left it by mid-morning and went to the corner by noon and was at the south wall by the afternoon, never fixed, always in the crossing. He wrote that he had three of them — three children out of thirty-one who spent the day in motion between the window and the corner, who could not be assigned to either the sea children or the corner children because they belonged to both and to neither.

He read this slowly.

He thought about three children out of thirty-one in perpetual motion — crossing the wide room from the east window to the corner and back, the day organised as a series of transitions between the two attending conditions. He thought about these three children as the children whose attending was not spatial but temporal — who needed not a fixed position but a sequence of positions, the day itself as the attending structure.

He thought: the third attending is the attending of time.

He wrote this in the margin of Joseph's letter: the attending of time — not the fixed position but the day as the sequence of conditions. The wide attending in the morning and the still attending at noon and the threshold attending in the afternoon. The third child lives in the sequence.

Joseph wrote more. He wrote that the south bench was correct but that he had a further observation: the three moving children always crossed the room by the south wall. He had noticed this for years without understanding it. He had thought it was the south light — the children drawn to the south face in crossing. He now understood it differently. He wrote: they cross by the south wall because they need the south light in the crossing. The transition requires light. The threshold is not a dark corridor between two lit rooms. The threshold is itself a lit condition.

He thought about the threshold as a lit condition. He thought about the south bench and the south window above it — the south light entering at the height of the sitting body. He thought about the light in the crossing — the south light for the child in transition, the light that accompanied the movement between the wide attending and the still attending.

He thought: the bench is not only for sitting. The bench is for the lit crossing.

He thought about the section and the pencil bench study. He thought about the south window above the bench — the correct height, the light for the body in transition. He thought about Joseph's three children crossing by the south wall in the south light, the bodies already knowing the correct path before the architect had drawn it.

He thought: the children drew this before I did.

He thought about the children always drawing the practice's most complete section. He thought about the sea children at the east window and the corner children in the storage corner and the moving children crossing by the south wall. He thought about the three attending conditions drawn by Joseph's thirty-one children in the daily life of the wrong classroom — the children finding, in the incorrect room, the nearest available version of the correct conditions.

He thought: they have been attending correctly in the wrong room for years.

He thought: the correction gives them the correct room for what they already know how to do.

He picked up the mapping pen.

He drew the bench in ink. The south bench at thirty-five centimetres — the sitting height, the resting place, the threshold condition. He drew the south window above it — the window at the height of the sitting body, the south light entering at the level of the transitional face. He drew the window at the correct width for the south light — not the hundred and forty centimetres of the east window and not the modest four hundred millimetres of the north corner window but the middle width, the width for the light in crossing, the threshold width.

He drew the bench with the pen and thought about the three children crossing by the south wall in the south light and thought about the crossing as the third attending — the attending of the threshold, the attending of time, the attending that moved through the day between the wide and the still. He drew the bench as the section's answer to the moving child.

He sat back and looked at the completed section.

The full coastal section now: the east window and the corner and the south bench. The three conditions of Joseph's thirty-one children — the sea children and the corner children and the moving children — were drawn into the one room. The honest coastal classroom is complete.

He thought: the section is finished.

He thought: it took four months and two correspondents and three visits and one November and one letter from Raymond and one letter from Joseph and three attending children who crossed by the south wall.

He thought: the section is made of all of this.

He wrote to Joseph that afternoon: your answer is correct. I have drawn the bench in ink. The south window above it at the threshold width. The light in the crossing. The section is complete. I will send the full drawing in the post tomorrow with the specifications. Thank you for the ten days. Thank you for the three children who crossed by the south wall. The section is theirs as much as it is the practice's.

He wrote in the pocket notebook after the letter was sealed: Joseph's answer — the third attending is the attending of time. The moving children cross by the south wall because the threshold is a lit condition. The south bench in ink. The coastal section is complete: east window, corner, south bench. Four months. Two correspondents. Three visiting children who already knew. The section is made of the correspondence.

He looked at the coastal section on the drawing board — the ink drawing in its three conditions, the wide attending and the still attending and the threshold attending, the everywhere-at-once and the stays and the lit crossing, the three windows for the three kinds of attending that Joseph's thirty-one children had been practising in the wrong room for years.

He thought: the practice draws the correct room for what the attending people already know.

He thought: the correspondence finds the room.

He was glad.

End of Chapter Two Hundred and Sixty-Two