The School of Many Doors – 110

Dear Companions of the Villa,

Mary has built us a House of Dreamers, and if I were a wiser man I might leave it untouched, lest I dim her fire with my fumbling. But I am her husband, and husbands are permitted — nay, doomed — to add on rooms to their wives’ houses, whether or not the architect approves. So let me build a wing beside hers, not to rival it, but to give her dream a corridor to walk through.

I call it the School of Many Doors.

In this school, no one enters but once. Children, yes — they come first, as they always have, eager and wide-eyed. But so too do the elders, the merchants, the once-millers, even the dreamers who find themselves in need of fresh tools. Each door opens not only to a new subject but to a new beginning. A man of forty may step into philosophy as if for the first time; a woman of sixty may enter music; a baker, whose ovens have cooled, may pass into astronomy.

The school is not solemn, though it is serious. There are courtyards where Socrates might have loitered, questioning boys until they wriggled free; there are halls where masters of craft take on apprentices not for profit but for pride; there are chambers where poets argue with scientists, and both learn to be humbled. Every door opens to an unfinished room, because learning is never finished — it is hammered, chiseled, sung, argued, wept into being.

Now, Mary would scold me if I pretended this was my idea alone. In truth, her dream made it necessary. For if we would have a nation of dreamers, then we must also give them the schooling that teaches dreams to endure. Otherwise, as Byron warned, ease becomes vanity, and vanity corrodes. The School of Many Doors is the scaffolding that keeps the House of Dreamers from floating off into fancy.

And here, if you will indulge me, I must turn husband again. For when Mary writes, she does not simply imagine futures; she conjures them. She is herself the first graduate of this school I describe — a pupil of philosophy, poetry, and science, whose dreaming has outpaced her tutors. I am proud of her, as much as I am in love with her, and I write these words not to temper her fire, but to kindle it further.

So let it be: her House, my School, and our shared hope that the age of machines will not be the end of purpose but its flowering. May every man and woman pass through doors without number, and may all the while the House of Dreamers stand alight beside them.

— Percy