The Safe House by Christophe Boltanski

Author:Christophe Boltanski [Boltanski, Christophe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-44922-7
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

Twice a day, Jean-Élie rushed back down the stairs. He went down to the cellar to put coal in the central furnace. Each time he woke the fat, helpless monster balanced on its iron posts, the walls began to tremble. The sound of the shovel, the coals that banged against each other, and the crank my uncle turned with a forceful hand to make the ashes fall through the grille—all these noises rose through the pipes and echoed on every floor. Rue-de-Grenelle was a living being. I’m using the past tense, since the house has now returned to the stillness of a building. In my grandmother’s day, it was made up of organs. The kitchen was the orifice. The brain’s ghostly glow illuminated the office. The parlor was the skin. In this cameral anatomy, the stairs were the legs. We were swallowed in the belly of the whale. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes defined the leviathan as the antithesis of savagery, like an absolute authority, capable of establishing political order, of making peace and security reign. We’d taken refuge in limbo to escape the chaos outside.

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