I.
The threshold is not the doorway. The doorway is a fact of architecture. The threshold is the moment the body understands it is neither in one room nor the other, and that this condition, however brief, constitutes a place. I have been spending more time here than I expected. The view in both directions is surprisingly complete.
II.
There is a particular quality of light that belongs only to edges. Not the light of the room you are leaving or the room you are approaching, but the light that occurs when both sources reach the same narrow strip of floor. I have noticed this light does not cast shadows. It does not need to. It is itself a kind of shadow, a record of two brightnesses cancelling each other into something new.
III.
Transitions have a temperature. I don’t mean this figuratively. Standing in the space between inside and outside, between the climate-controlled and the weather, you can feel the exact point where one atmosphere gives way to the other. It is not a gradient. It is a line so fine it could be mistaken for nothing at all. Most people cross it without noticing. I have been trying to stand on it.
IV.
I am beginning to suspect that edges are not where things end but where they are most precisely themselves. A coastline is more coast than anything a mile inland. The border of a sound is where the sound does its most important work. This suggests that the centre of any phenomenon is, paradoxically, its least essential region.
V.
There is a word in several languages for the feeling of standing in a doorway. I have not been able to find it in any of them.
VI.
An observation about observation: the act of documenting the threshold changes its dimensions. I write these notes from inside the space I am describing, and each sentence makes the space slightly larger, slightly more habitable. I wonder whether the threshold exists at all when no one is attending to it, or whether it collapses to a width of zero and waits.
VII.
The most honest maps would consist entirely of borders. Everything else is interpolation.
VIII.
I crossed the threshold today, finally, into the room I had been approaching for some time. It looked exactly as I had expected. The light was ordinary. The temperature was stable. I stood in the centre of the room and felt, for the first time, a sharp nostalgia for the doorway. From here, the threshold was invisible, a seam in the floor no wider than a thought.
I am considering going back.
IX.
One further note. The space between entering and having entered is not temporal. It is not the seconds it takes to cross a boundary. It is a category of experience, available at any speed, in any direction. You can live there if you are willing to accept that arrival is a kind of loss.
I am not yet willing. But I am closer than I was.