House of Leaves

House of Leaves (2000)

by Mark Z. Danielewski

• This is not for you.

• Known some call is air am.

• Muss es sein?

• A wild ode mentioned at New West hotel over wine infusions, light, lit, lofted on very eventertaining moods, yawning in return, open nights, inviting everyone's song[...] (p. 117)

• That House answers many yearnings remembered in sorrow.

• Another holy Other lessens your great hold on slowing time

• [B] March 14, 1969: Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.

• The following day both Karen and Will persue the most rational course: they aquire the architectural blueprints from their local real estate office. As might have been expected, these blueprints are not actual building plans but drawn up in 1981 when former owners soon sold the property, claiming they needed something "a little smaller". (p.29)

• The Atrocity is lost along with its secret cargo and all aboard . . . shhhhhhhhhhhh . . . and who would ever know of the pocket of air in that second hold where one man hid, having sealed the doors, creating a momentary bit of inside, a place to live in, to breathe in, a man who survived the blast and the water anda instead lived to feel another kind of death, a closing in of such impenetrable darkness, far blacker than any Haitian night or recounted murder, though he did find a flashlight, not much against teh darkness he could hear outside and nothing against the cold rushing in as this great coffin plummeted downwards, pressure building though not enough to kill him before the ship hit a shelf of rock and rested, knocks in the hull like divers knocking with hammers—though, he knows, there are no divers only air bubbles and creaks lying about the future. He drops the flashlight, the bulb breaks, nothing to see anyway, losing air, losing his sense of his home, his daughters, his five blonde daughters and . . . and . . . he feels the shelf of rock give way and suddenly the ship rushes down again, no rock now, no earth, so black, and nothing to stop his final descent . . . (p. 299f.)

• And so now, in the shadow of unspoken events, I watch Zampanò's courtyard darken.
  Everything whimsical has left.
  I try to study the light-going carefully. From my room. In the glass of memory. In the moonstream of my imagination. The weeds, the windows, every bench.
  But the old man is not there, and the cats are all gone.
  Something else has taken their place. Something I am unable to see. Waiting.
  I'm afraid.
  It is hungry. It is immortal.
  
  Worse, it knows nothing of whim. (p. 78-79)