Part Seven: Matthew Rose Sorensen

“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”

— Susanna Clarke

Dear Friends,

We have reached the end of our book club. On the episode attached above, I pull some of the thematic strings we have been following together, and attempt to describe why this book was so important to me. Below are some of those thoughts in writing, some borrowed from a review I wrote of Piranesi for Plough.

Throughout this book, we as readers have been haunted by a tension: we love the way Piranesi sees the world, and yet we are concerned for him. We think he does not have the full picture, we think he might be in danger. And now, as we draw to a close we see that he was. As we grieve Piranesi’s loss of innocence, we grieve our own. We wish we could live in a world where we didn’t know about evil, where meaning came naturally an intuitively to us. In this final revelation, we wonder: will the man called Piranesi be okay?

Throughout the podcast, we observes some of the philosophical underpinnings of the book, namely Barfield’s idea that premodern man had a more meaningful relationship with nature, which he called original participation. In his influential essay “The Rediscovery of Meaning,” Owen Barfield tries to account for the “pure cussedness” of the fact that “the more able man becomes to manipulate the world to his advantage, the less he can perceive any meaning in it.” Piranesi seems to embody original participation where the Other represents the modern alienation from nature and meaning.

In this chapter, Piranesi describes the Other’s alienation imaged by one of the statues:

“It is a statue of a man kneeling on his plinth: a sword lies at his side, its blade broken in five pieces. Roundabout lie other broken pieces, the remains of a sphere. The man has used his sword to shatter the sphere because he wanted to understand it, but now he finds that he has destroyed both sphere and sword. This puzzles him, but at the same time part of him refuses to accept that the sphere is broken and worthless. He has picked up some of the fragments and stares at them intently in the hope that they will eventually bring him new knowledge.”

In this tragicomic portrait, Clarke vividly illustrates Barfield’s concerns about the destruction of meaning in the modern world. And in the shattered sword and globe we see also a reflection of our present crisis of environmental ruin, which, ironically has coincided with the ascendance of purely “scientific” and mechanical accounts of nature.Through Piranesi’s eyes, we have inhabited a beautiful world where we are able to set aside the sword and the globe we’ve been so vigorously pounding, and experience a place charged with beauty and meaning and mystery. But even as we cherish the world through Piranesi’s eyes, we feel keenly his ache of isolation, and the terrible bravery it will take for him to come out of the life he has known into the warmth of human friendship. We want to see through Piranesi’s eyes, but we also want what is best for him. Though emerging from his innocence seems inevitable and necessary, we wonder wistfully if it will mean the end of his beautiful relationship to his surroundings.

In this final chapter, Piranesi emerges, exiled from the house, or perhaps graduated from it, into the much desired but complicated world of Manchester, police stations, and credit cards. In this new world he struggles to understand who he is. Matthew Rose Sorensen has “fallen asleep” inside of him, and it is Piranesi who most frequently objects to the modern world in which he finds himself. But the man called Piranesi is now no longer either Piranesi or Matthew Rose Sorensen. Inside of him is both innocence and lost innocence. He cannot unsee the wickedness and sadness of the World, or the House. How can he reconcile or integrate these realities? Who will he be now that both of these realities live within him?

It was the final chapter that really secured this book as significant in my psyche. Prior to this chapter, I was intrigued, compelled, horrified, but after this chapter I was moved, perhaps even changed. I think it is because I feel that Piranesi and Matthew Rose Sorensen live in me. In Piranesi I experience some whiff of lost innocence that once defined me. Some natural trust, joy, and spirituality. I grieve for Piranesi’s loss of innocence because I grieve for my own, for all of us. I wonder if he will be able to find beauty and goodness when all the secrets are told. And in this final chapter, we get a whiff of hope that maybe he can.

In this final chapter, Piranesi passes people in the street and realises that they were represented in the House. He longs to tell them how important, how dignified, how beautiful they truly are. In realising the true identity of these strangers, I think that Piranesi finds his own true identity as a Beloved Child of the House.

For many years, I have prayed Psalm 27: “One thing I have asked of the Lord, this is what I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life” (Psalm 27:4, Celtic Daily Prayer Book). The irony of this prayer, so often uttered in my own living room or on an airplane, has often struck me; I am not in the House of the Lord. But since reading Piranesi, this passage has taken on a new meaning for me. To Piranesi, his whole world is the House of God, and every coral and shell announces him a “Beloved Child of the House.” I think with a pang of desire how much I long to see the world that way, and how difficult it sometimes is. And yet after reading Piranesi, my eyes have been attuned anew to the possibility that these spiritual realities may not be far away, but seeping through every pang of loveliness in this weary old world. Because, as Piranesi reminds us:

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.