살아있음에 대한 크리스토퍼 알렉산더의 견해
Christopher Alexander on being alive:1
…I am free to the extent I have this quality in me…. This wild freedom, this passion, comes into our lives in the instant we let go…. And it happens when our inner forces are resolved…. Of course, in practice we often don’t know just what our inner forces are.
We live, for months, for years, acting in a certain way, not knowing whether we are free or not, doubting, not even sure when we are successfully resolved, and when we aren’t.
Yet still there are those special secret moments in our lives, when we smile unexpectedly - when all our forces are resolved.
…
We cannot be aware of these most precious moments when they are actually happening. In fact, the conscious effort to attain this quality, or to be free, or to be anything, the glance which this creates, will always spoil it. It is, instead, when we forget ourselves completely: playing the fool perhaps among a group of friends, or swimming out to sea, or walking simply, or trying to finish something late at night over a table with a group of friends, cigarette stuck to lower lip, eyes tired, earnest concentration. All these moments in my own life - I only know them now, in retrospect.
Yet each of us knows from experience the feeling which this quality creates in us…. And for this reason, each one of us can also recognize this quality when it occurs in buildings.
…
Places which have this quality, invite this quality to come to life in us. And when we have this quality in us, we tend to make it come to life in towns and buildings which we help to build.
See also
Footnotes
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Chapter 3 “Being alive”, The timeless way of building ↩