Why Do We Have Doors
I admit, this is a bit of an odd question, as it seems a self-evident part of life that we put doors on our houses, buildings, and rooms. However, some of my class work discussing religious architecture, which historically maintained some pretty massive doors, got me thinking, “Why not leave our houses doorless? Why not leave them open?” Well, I imagine most would answer that they are to keep people or things out of your house. I’m not a big fan of bugs, other little critters, or strangers waltzing through my house, and I imagine you aren’t either. Your space isn’t for everyone.
I think this means that our houses are, ultimately, set apart; and set apart for a purpose for that matter, perhaps for comfort, rest, safety, or another similar reason. Fundamentally, it demarcates one space, your house, as something opposed to another space, the outside. Your house is set apart from the rest of the world’s space. Yet, because a door opens, there is opportunity to cross over from one space to the other.
You aren’t erecting an impassable wall that completely blocks off one space from another; there is some level of interplay between one space and the other. In fact, it facilitates the transition from one space to another: it acts as a bridge from your house to the outside world. A simple example of this facilitating capacity is the presence of knockers, door viewers, doorbells, and locks on house entrances to ease the transfer from inside to out or vice versa.
Where We Use Doors
Of course, this applies to more than just houses. Not every space in your house has the same purpose, thus your kitchen is separated from your bedroom, and your living room from the garage, while at the same time still retaining that ability to transfer from one to another. It extends beyond the perimeter of the house as well, with churches, government institutions, offices, and even cities and nations having doors, whether literal or figurative. This is because, as stated earlier, these different spaces all have different purposes and are meant to facilitate the transition from one to another.
When done well, doors, and the rooms they separate, are tools for helping us separate our tasks from each other; a kitchen is for cooking while your garage is probably used for storage, maintenance, or something else where things get a little dirty. However, if, for some reason, your kitchen and garage shared the same space, it would be excessively difficult to cook or to find your winter clothes. This is a rather obvious thing to keep separate, and I think most houses do. However, my hunch is that our modern world has started letting spaces leak into each other too much, which depreciates our capacity to handle our various tasks.
A Personal Anecdote
In my before-college days, I was homeschooled. Once I reached middle school age, and my curriculum started growing in complexity, I had to bear more responsibility for getting my work done. With that, I started getting work done in my room, instead of going to a common study space. Over time, my room eventually became a space for sleeping, working, reading, practicing guitar, and playing video games. The space became progressively less demarcated, encompassing more and more activities. So, the boundaries between each activity started blurring together. Video game time started spilling into time for schoolwork. My typical bedtime started overlapping with practicing guitar. I can remember having a certain level of anxiety about this, as my mind and attention were constantly being pulled in 4 or 5 different ways. There wasn’t a clear groove, pathway, or direction to head in. Everything became mixed, undifferentiated, or, as Historian of Religion Mircea Eliade puts it, “profane.”
The Sacred and Profane
In “profane experience…no true orientation is possible… There is no longer any world, there are only fragments of a shattered universe, an amorphous mass consisting of an infinite number of more or less neutral places in which man moves,” as Eliade puts it. In his view, everything is neutral, lacking definition, blending together, and, ultimately, bland and meaningless without boundaries. In a way, it is difficult to know how to be or what mode of conduct or being to adopt without signs, pathways, or designations. For Eliade, this is the traditional meaning of sacred: something set apart from the rest so as to orient and found.
The sacred interprets our experience and allows us to see purpose and direction in that experience. It is why when you walk into the kitchen you might get hungrier, or when I smell the coffee shop in the library that I think of reading and studying. Our surroundings are meant to direct us, to help guide us towards the person and place we want to be. Otherwise, we start “swarming with myths, decaying hierophanies (images that express the sacred), and secularized symbols.” Fundamentally, we lose our imagination and “to have imagination is to be able to see the world in its totality, for the power and mission of the Images is to” make things graspable by the rational mind.
What can we do?
I don’t want this to be another, woe to our culture that has lost religion. My point here is that we need more demarcation. We need boundaries in our lives. If not, everything is blurred together, and we lose ourselves. So, my call or suggestion for you, which is one I have attempted to apply in my life, is to start setting up ‘ritual’ or ‘sacred’ spaces and things in your life. When you work, wear certain clothing that you don’t wear when you’re relaxing on a weekend. When you eat, try to partake in a consistent location without multitasking. When at home, separate the recreation of phones and TV’s from your place of rest. If you want to become a reader, designate a room for it and buy a nice, comfortable chair, and maybe a nice corner table for a glass and a lamp. If you work from home, try keeping work siloed in a particular room, refraining from eating, scrolling, or lounging there. If we build more doors in our lives, gateways from each aspect of life to another, I imagine we will all be more motivated, at ease, and, essentially, whole.
Noah McRoberts
P.S. Below, you can find some of the resources and people that have helped me formulate my ideas.
Jonathan Pageau
Jonathan Pageau is an Orthodox Icon carver, who has recently entered public dialogue surrounding religion, myth, and symbols. He is the founder of The Symbolic World, which is a multimedia organization intent on “Rediscovering the symbolic patterns that inform the cosmos.” He has recently started publishing new versions of the classic European Fairy Tales in addition to operation a podcast and YouTube channel as well as joining folks like Jordan B. Peterson and Alex O’Connor on their respective podcasts discussing myth and religion. You can check his work out below.
Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade was a Romanian 20th century philosopher and historian of religion. The work of his that most inspired my writing was his book The Sacred and the Profane. He wrote countless other works, notably Patterns in Comparative Religion, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, A History of Religious Ideas, and Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism. He was a friend of Carl Jung, who worked closely with Eliade for 10 years before passing in 1961. He is one of, if not the, premiere thinker on religion from the 20th century.
Ancient Greece and Rome
Though not directly accessible via links, Ancient Greek and Rome architecture reveal the intentionality behind intent for spaces. I had the opportunity to travel to Italy and Greece to interact with their ancient structures, and the way they directed your attention using materials, art, and physical terrain were stunning. You could see and feel the difference that the intentionality of doorways, paths, entrances, and layout had on the way you perceived the room. Viewing ancient, and I imagine medieval, architecture, you can get a good feel for space and its utility for demarcation.
