WALLS

They form the frontiers between the political and the private. They divide the world into two realms: the big outer one where history happens, and the small inner one where the concrete experience of life is centered. But they divide in a curios way: they create the private realm by dividing. Were it not for walls, everything would be political (which means totalitarian in a very obnoxious sense of the word). Through this curiously dividing character, the walls pose a typically human choice (typically human, because it allows for no decision): either to leave the walls in order to conquer the world outside, or to stay within the walls in order to find oneself. The walls show clearly: to conquer the world outside means to lose oneself, and to find oneself means to lose the world. This is so because the walls are compact and allow for no osmosis.

This vision of culture becomes even more enlightening if we imagine one of the four walls torn down and thus transformed into a glassless window. The three remaining walls become a stage on which the tragic-comedy of culture, with man on a stage as an actor. What is truly historic about this vision is its representational (symbolic) character, and the fact that it is temporarily limited process. Culture thus appears as a "fiction"… the three remaining walls enclose the pathos of man's attempt to impose his will upon nature, and the possibility of this final defeat by universal inertia – for the three remaining walls themselves will come down in the end.

Villem Flusser