the doorway into someone’s home became a boundary saturated with both social and mystical power. Wilson writes that when someone asks to enter a home, they request that the host “expose or reveal something of [her] private domain to neighbors.”8 Urban society is full of closed doors and hidden rooms, which gave people a new way to interact with each other, exposing only parts of themselves. Ironically, it took the invention of a city for people to conceive of being alone, away from the crowd. Put another way, the concept of privacy had arrived, and with it the concept of a public.
