Speaker 1: Even after all my years in construction, nothing prepared me
Speaker 1: for the museum. Not its century-thick walls, not its constant
Speaker 1: groan in the wind, not even its maze of chilly
Speaker 1: corridors that wound into one another with the logic of
Speaker 1: a dream. I'd retired from a life of blueprints, schedules,
Speaker 1: and the measured comfort of right angles, but I'd never
Speaker 1: shaken the habit of understanding space. Volunteering here at the
Speaker 1: city's storied but stubbornly eccentric museum, was supposed to keep
Speaker 1: my mind sharp and give me the pleasant sense of
Speaker 1: contributing to history. I imagined myself, mug of tea in hand,
Speaker 1: contentedly filing a few old maps, chatting with the archivists,
Speaker 1: and enjoying the echoing hush as visitors drifted between oil
Speaker 1: portraits and ship models. The museum was a palimpsest. Its
Speaker 1: central block, all sombre stone and deep-set windows, had served
Speaker 1: at times as a merchant's guild hall, a naval ministry,
Speaker 1: even a de facto courthouse during the Revolution. Around it
Speaker 1: sprawled generations of additions, a glass-roofed conservatory here, a squat
Speaker 1: Baroque rotunda there, a high modernist wing with floors that
Speaker 1: never quite lined up. Architects, their ambitions surpassing, it seemed,
Speaker 1: their adherence to planning, had left their thumbprints at every turn,
Speaker 1: sometimes overlaying, sometimes tunnelling right through what came before. During
Speaker 1: my first week, Sophia, the head archivist, assigned me to
Speaker 1: digitise the museum's full archive of floor plans. So many,
Speaker 1: she said, sighing theatrically, passing me a heavy box in
Speaker 1: the back office. Try not to get lost, will you?
Speaker 1: I cracked the box open, blueprints ranging from ancient, browned
Speaker 1: vellum to crisply stenciled post-war prints, as contradictory a pile
Speaker 1: as I'd ever seen. One stack listed seventy-three rooms, another,
Speaker 1: apparently for the very same year, only sixty. Doors migrated
Speaker 1: from the southern wall to the eastern overnight. Corridors thickened, pinched,
Speaker 1: then disappeared altogether, or doubled back upon themselves like snakes.
Speaker 1: I chalked it up to the ordinary madness that plagued
Speaker 1: old civic projects. Clerks copying the wrong plan, surveyors estimating wildly,
Speaker 1: builders correcting mistakes with a chisel rather than a pencil.
Speaker 1: Half the joy of old buildings is in the way
Speaker 1: they bear, and betray the passing of hands. And yet
Speaker 1: something nagged. A plan from 1839 included an entire Linden Gallery,
Speaker 1: where by my memory and recent exploration, nothing but a
Speaker 1: load-bearing wall and the docent break-room stood. A survey from
Speaker 1: 1892 showed four external doors, but the current building had five. Another, curiously, undated,
Speaker 1: showed corridors forming a closed loop impossible given both exterior
Speaker 1: and interior photos. Here, a turret jutted out on the
Speaker 1: northwest corner there, a wing extended due south into what
Speaker 1: was now just herbaceous border. I'd been in enough buildings
Speaker 1: to expect mess, but not this degree of malleability, not
Speaker 1: this persistent sense that the physical place was only ever
Speaker 1: partly captured in ink. It dawned on me, sitting there
Speaker 1: surrounded by the scent of old paper, that no two maps,
Speaker 1: regardless of era, agreed even on major features. Yet the
Speaker 1: people who drew them certainly believed they were producing a record,
Speaker 1: not a riddle. Each blueprint was a proposition, and each
Speaker 1: one contradicted the world outside its folds. I decided, as
Speaker 1: engineers do, that the only thing for it was closer study. Surely,
Speaker 1: after a few days in the actual museum, walking the halls,
Speaker 1: measuring my steps, I could account for every discrepancy. But
Speaker 1: the deeper I looked, the more the place slipped sideways
Speaker 1: around its own edges, never threatening, never sinister, only strangely,
Speaker 1: stubbornly ungraspable. I should have known better than to expect
Speaker 1: a building to sit still. The city outside the museum's
Speaker 1: humped walls was an old port, wind-carved, brined, famous for
Speaker 1: riding out blockades, fires, and half a dozen ill-planned wars.
Speaker 1: Its rubble anchored the foundations of half the city's houses.
Speaker 1: Bits of broken castle mixed with shattered glass, stone ballast
Speaker 1: from the ships that used to come from everywhere and nowhere.
Speaker 1: As children, we'd learn to tell the city's story by
Speaker 1: its skyline. A mishmash of spires, domes, and more often
Speaker 1: than not, construction cranes inching over another half-finished plaza. My
Speaker 1: father had laid track for the city's old tramlines. I
Speaker 1: took to civil engineering because it promised clarity, or so
Speaker 1: I thought. I'd spent thirty years buried in infrastructure. Miles
Speaker 1: of pipes underfoot, smooth tarmac overhead, every component measured down
Speaker 1: to its tolerance. My colleagues joked I could spot an
Speaker 1: out-of-true wall from a hundred metres. After my wife passed,
Speaker 1: restless and tired of rigid habits, I decided to trade
Speaker 1: concrete for community. The museum became that outlet, a place
Speaker 1: where the details still mattered, but time moved at an
Speaker 1: ambling human pace. Sophia interviewed me herself. Thirties, brisk but
Speaker 1: unfailingly warm, she seemed most at home half buried behind
Speaker 1: a stack of reference books, glasses always at the top
Speaker 1: of her head. You're an engineer, but you love stories,
Speaker 1: she'd said, as if delivering a diagnosis. Perfect. We're made
Speaker 1: of stories, flaws, and tea. Mark, the intern, was almost
Speaker 1: comically earnest. He was always fiddling with scanners and tablets.
Speaker 1: eager to upload another box of catalogues to the cloud,
Speaker 1: making hopeful noises about open access, and making the past searchable.
Speaker 1: I suspected what he really wanted was to impress Sophia
Speaker 1: and secure a recommendation letter, but his relentless optimism brightened
Speaker 1: the archive's gloom. Elsa, now eighty if a day, had
Speaker 1: probably forgotten more about local law than most of us
Speaker 1: would ever learn. She drifted from quadrant to quadrant, leading
Speaker 1: tour with a proud, tolerant air, occasionally interjecting facts the
Speaker 1: way a good cook adds salt, just when you weren't
Speaker 1: expecting it, but always essential. She liked to claim that
Speaker 1: she'd worked in every room that's ever existed here, save
Speaker 1: the ones that don't. I laughed at the time. My
Speaker 1: days took on a pleasant rhythm, morning tea in the
Speaker 1: sun-scattered courtyard above the muffled traffic, then hours sorting files,
Speaker 1: digitising plans, copying old descriptions into the register. I tried
Speaker 1: to make sense of their languages, some blueprints written in
Speaker 1: the crisp block script of engineers, others in spidery, almost
Speaker 1: calligraphic hand, with flourishes around every measurement. By mid-afternoon, chilly
Speaker 1: air from the old stone would have settled in. I'd
Speaker 1: walk the corridors, checking lights and panels with Mark, reciting
Speaker 1: the daily ritual of troubles to report. By evening, after
Speaker 1: the last visitors had trailed out, I'd sometimes slip upstairs
Speaker 1: and wander the halls, letting the hush settle into my bones.
Speaker 1: In those quiet times, I found myself trying to square
Speaker 1: the maps with the matter around me. Bad measurements, I
Speaker 1: told myself. Old paper warps, memory blurs. Maybe an early
Speaker 1: architect was feeling fanciful or too fond of Sherry. I'd
Speaker 1: seen record-keeping errors enough to recognize them, and I tried,
Speaker 1: at first, to fit every anomaly into my mental toolkit
Speaker 1: of explanations. But the strangeness refused to be clumped under quirk.
Speaker 1: Day after day, something failed to line up. There was
Speaker 1: a tension, not of threat, but of questions slipping out
Speaker 1: of the corner of your eye. I never lost my
Speaker 1: way outright, but I grew to expect that things I'd
Speaker 1: walked past yesterday might look, or be arranged, just a
Speaker 1: little differently tomorrow. The contradiction that finally snapped my patience
Speaker 1: arrived late one afternoon. I was cross-referencing a particularly ornate
Speaker 1: plan from the 1860s, a fanciful thing, all scrollwork and
Speaker 1: ink blots, with a quiet hallway outside the back office.
Speaker 1: My task was simple, Verify the passageways, check for evidence
Speaker 1: of a now-missing cloakroom, note any changes. Several times I'd
Speaker 1: strolled this route, confident that I knew every inch of
Speaker 1: skirting board and every crooked frame. But this time, as
Speaker 1: I reached the corner by the stairwell, I saw a
Speaker 1: corridor branching left. Narrow, lined with faded prints, and ending,
Speaker 1: as far as I could see, at a tall window.
Speaker 1: Yet I could have sworn it wasn't there yesterday. I
Speaker 1: checked the plan. The corridor existed, and yet it was
Speaker 1: meant to terminate in a wall. On my previous walks,
Speaker 1: whenever I'd glanced that way, I'd seen only a locked
Speaker 1: supply closet and a mural of the city's old lighthouse.
Speaker 1: Now here was this passage fully lit, with fresh scuff
Speaker 1: marks as if daily used. I stood there for a
Speaker 1: good minute, frowning, retracing my steps, heart beating not in alarm,
Speaker 1: but in something closer to disbelief. Sophia appeared, Brow furrowed
Speaker 1: behind her fogging glasses, hauling a box of catalogues. Trying
Speaker 1: a new shortcut, she teased. Did this passage always connect
Speaker 1: through to the library wing? I asked, trying to sound casual.
Speaker 1: She looked at me, then at the corridor, as if
Speaker 1: surprised by the question. Of course, she said, a hint
Speaker 1: of affection in her exasperation. It's my favourite. Cut through here,
Speaker 1: up two steps, hang a right, and in three minutes
Speaker 1: you're with the earliest maps. much faster than the main
Speaker 1: gallery loop. Later that day, I relayed the same experience
Speaker 1: to Mark, who was updating tablet records in the break room.
Speaker 1: I described Sophia's route. He laughed, shaking his head. No way.
Speaker 1: If you try going straight to the library from here,
Speaker 1: you'll just end up by the statue. Everyone has to
Speaker 1: duck outside, unless you're going the long way round via
Speaker 1: the donor wall. I looked at him closely. You're telling
Speaker 1: me there's absolutely no corridor that gets you there directly?
Speaker 1: He shrugged. If there is, it's invisible, or you need
Speaker 1: Elsa's golden ticket to find it. I tried both routes
Speaker 1: that afternoon, walking first with Sophia, then tracing Mark's steps. Strangely,
Speaker 1: both seemed plausible, each depositing me where promised, yet the
Speaker 1: spaces traversed were different. Sophia's shortcut cleaved past a portrait
Speaker 1: gallery and the donor books. Mark S. required a brisk
Speaker 1: walk along the courtyard and back through the winter vestibule.
Speaker 1: Standing alone later, I realized my records for both routes
Speaker 1: showed different lengths, even different numbers of turns. The contradiction persisted.
Speaker 1: Trusted colleagues were utterly confident in mutually exclusive routes, routes
Speaker 1: I had now experienced myself. It was as if the
Speaker 1: building flexed to supply their memory, mine, or some combination thereof.
Speaker 1: I pushed the thought aside. There had to be a
Speaker 1: rational explanation, a set of closed-off doors I hadn't noticed,
Speaker 1: a janitor with an inconsistent lock schedule, or perhaps my
Speaker 1: own brain tangling distances. But under the fluorescent lights, the
Speaker 1: questions began to multiply faster than answers. Driven by unease,
Speaker 1: I can't claim it was anything less personal than a
Speaker 1: challenge to my professional pride. I set out to map
Speaker 1: the museum myself. Each morning, notebook in hand, I paced
Speaker 1: the wings, taking quiet inventory. I started with simple sketches.
Speaker 1: Main arteries here, secondary corridors there, staircases wherever I could
Speaker 1: verify them by foot. I charted every turn, every display case,
Speaker 1: every window, trusting in my experience, and at first, in
Speaker 1: the permanent solidity of bricks. It became apparent, after even
Speaker 1: a few days, that no amount of diligent note-taking could
Speaker 1: produce a stable map. Rarely dramatic, the shifts were subtle
Speaker 1: enough to make me doubt myself. On Tuesday— The route
Speaker 1: from the reception to the ceramics gallery involved a stairway
Speaker 1: I hadn't found Monday. On Thursday, a sunlit alcove, where
Speaker 1: I'd stopped to stretch, was replaced by an ironic collection
Speaker 1: of now and then city postcards. Occasionally, a staircase seemed shallower,
Speaker 1: or an archway lower than before. My pedometer, which I
Speaker 1: wore for these experiments, fluctuated wildly. The same route might
Speaker 1: take 1,700 steps one day, 2,200 the next. No one
Speaker 1: else seemed to find cause for concern. When I asked
Speaker 1: Elsa for directions to the maritime room, she gave a
Speaker 1: winding route, insisting, gently, that hers was the only sensible approach.
Speaker 1: Madame Duval, a retired teacher and regular museum fixture, insisted
Speaker 1: on yet another shortcut. Up the green stair, through the
Speaker 1: corridor behind the clock, and you're there in no time.
Speaker 1: We tried our way together. It worked, though my home-drawn
Speaker 1: plan insisted we'd walked through two walls and a coat check.
Speaker 1: On the way back, I tried to recreate the same
Speaker 1: shortcut alone. The corridor was gone. In its place stood
Speaker 1: a display of ship's wheels, no passage in sight. I
Speaker 1: retraced my steps, but could find only the official route,
Speaker 1: now blocked off for renovation. One Saturday, Elsa offered to
Speaker 1: let me join her afternoon tour. A chance, she said
Speaker 1: with a twinkle, to see how the building prefers to
Speaker 1: arrange itself for crowds. At the central juncture, the group
Speaker 1: split at an intersection. half following Elsa left, the rest
Speaker 1: trailing a volunteer guide to the right. Ten minutes later,
Speaker 1: both halves rejoined in the same airy portrait gallery, arriving
Speaker 1: from completely opposite directions. Each group adamant theirs was the
Speaker 1: most direct path. Back in archives, I leafed through yellowing
Speaker 1: photographs and ink sketches. Rooms shifted position from one decade
Speaker 1: to the next. A sunburst window appeared in the 1924 images,
Speaker 1: where later records matched nothing but blank stone. Exhibits migrated
Speaker 1: between wings, sometimes with no official documentation. I started to
Speaker 1: ask bolder questions. Was the museum always this inscrutable? It's
Speaker 1: just old, shrugged one guard. Things settle, paths change. Yet
Speaker 1: the feeling persisted. These weren't the gentle changes of age,
Speaker 1: but something stranger. New doors appearing in unblemished walls, or
Speaker 1: rooms one could not find twice by the same approach.
Speaker 1: It was during one of my aimless evening walks, mine
Speaker 1: trickling with these observations, that I saw a tiny, previously
Speaker 1: unnoticed sign just above knee height beneath a fire extinguisher.
Speaker 1: To the Red Suite, shortest route. It pointed left, down
Speaker 1: a path I'd never seen on any plan, yet which
Speaker 1: I recognised from descriptions in one of the oldest blueprints,
Speaker 1: where the Red Suite was the pride of the 1897 expansion.
Speaker 1: I followed, half out of duty, half out of play.
Speaker 1: The sign's arrow ushered me down a neatly carpeted passage
Speaker 1: that seemed to fit itself around my expectations. At the end,
Speaker 1: a pair of imposing red double doors, the suite's entrance, awaited.
Speaker 1: On the map in my head, there should have been
Speaker 1: only a storeroom, yet the room itself was perfectly arranged,
Speaker 1: faintly smelling of turpentine and polish. Each time I tried
Speaker 1: to integrate these new routes into my master floor plan,
Speaker 1: I ended with layers of crossings out, question marks, and
Speaker 1: cramped arrows pointing into blank spaces. On paper, the museum
Speaker 1: refused to resolve into coherence. What I physically experienced, and
Speaker 1: what I could map, were never quite in accord. Was
Speaker 1: it simple confusion on my part? A game the staff played, perhaps,
Speaker 1: a long-standing tradition of letting the newcomers chase their tails?
Speaker 1: I tested this theory. Asking three docents for directions yielded
Speaker 1: three incompatible sets of instructions— each delivered with remarkable certainty.
Speaker 1: But no matter how many plans I overlaid or routes
Speaker 1: I tested, the essential problem persisted. The museum was multiply mapped,
Speaker 1: multiply remembered, and never flattened to a single, consistent image.
Speaker 1: It was less a building, more a kind of paradox, accessible,
Speaker 1: clearly real, but resistant to summary. The suspicion grew that
Speaker 1: perhaps I'd been making a category error, assuming error, where
Speaker 1: the error might be in my assumption itself. On the
Speaker 1: fourth week, I spent an entire morning standing at a
Speaker 1: stubborn intersection outside the minerals collection, notebook open, coffee cooling
Speaker 1: on a radiator. I watched four different people, two staff,
Speaker 1: a visitor, and a maroon-jacketed security guard, approach from different wings,
Speaker 1: all converging at a single point. Each seemed to emerge
Speaker 1: from a direction no corridor quite connected on my map.
Speaker 1: I waved Mark over, describing what I'd seen. He grinned,
Speaker 1: holding up his phone. I'll bet you my last coffee
Speaker 1: you can't make a GPS log that comes out the
Speaker 1: same twice. We tried it together, walking from reception to
Speaker 1: the top floor along the obvious route. The signal flickered,
Speaker 1: then jumped, skittering our digital breadcrumbs from wall to wall,
Speaker 1: as if the building were flexing bandwidth around our passage.
Speaker 1: That afternoon, I eschewed old explanations, allergic as I was
Speaker 1: to metaphysics. in favour of closer, more direct experiments. First,
Speaker 1: I asked Sophia to guide me to the textile gallery
Speaker 1: using her preferred route. Trust your feet, she said, pressing
Speaker 1: the old elevator's brass button. I walked behind her, taking
Speaker 1: careful note of every turn, every unfamiliar painting passed. Later,
Speaker 1: I wrote down each landmark from memory, then tried to
Speaker 1: return the same way, but on my own, the hallway
Speaker 1: after the elevator split. somehow spilling me out near the
Speaker 1: maritime exhibits. Next, I followed Mark's directions, as exact as possible,
Speaker 1: letting him narrate as we moved. His guidance produced a slick,
Speaker 1: modernish shortcut. We managed the journey in less than half
Speaker 1: the time. I cross-referenced my notes, the distances failed to match,
Speaker 1: and an entire stairwell seemed to have vanished from the
Speaker 1: second route. That evening, emboldened, I tried to use my
Speaker 1: own recollections. No advice, no notes, just memory, hoping the
Speaker 1: path would solidify. But each time, a subtle difference emerged.
Speaker 1: A turn misplaced, a landing elongated, an alcove glimpsed only
Speaker 1: at the very moment I believed it should appear. Unwilling
Speaker 1: to conclude the building itself was malicious. Nothing so dramatic, really.
Speaker 1: I wondered instead if it was responding to the minds
Speaker 1: of its inhabitants. More precisely, that the experience of traversal,
Speaker 1: of expectation and habit, subtly reshaped how the museum made
Speaker 1: itself known, perhaps not physical shifting, at least not in
Speaker 1: the crude sense of moving walls, but a sort of
Speaker 1: architectural plasticity. An intensely intricate theatre, where the set changed
Speaker 1: based not just on the play, but on who happened
Speaker 1: to walk on stage, and what they intended to find.
Speaker 1: My next step was as digital as it was analogue.
Speaker 1: I brought a compass, two pedometers, and three mapping applications
Speaker 1: to the central stairwell, arguably the building's oldest core, dating
Speaker 1: to at least 1760. Standing there, I watched as the
Speaker 1: compass needle shivered, refusing to stabilize. Waypoints on the mapping
Speaker 1: apps jittered, sometimes jumping in wings in half a second.
Speaker 1: When I tried to record an audio note, static warbled
Speaker 1: in the playback. I could, it seemed, go up three
Speaker 1: flights and end on the second or fourth, depending on
Speaker 1: which entrance I used at the base. The conclusion was
Speaker 1: both counterintuitive and somehow, joyous, if a little unsettling. The error,
Speaker 1: if error it could be called, was in assuming the
Speaker 1: museum's geometry was fixed at all. It did not submit
Speaker 1: to the logic of blueprints, nor to the expectations of
Speaker 1: those who believed in absolute space. Later, sitting with Sophia
Speaker 1: in the outer courtyard, damp seats, autumn chill sneaking under
Speaker 1: my coat, I tried to broach my theory. Do you
Speaker 1: ever think, I said, bracing for a laugh, that the
Speaker 1: building knows how you remember it? She sipped her tea
Speaker 1: and looked at me from over her glasses. I think
Speaker 1: after a lifetime here, you start letting it find you.
Speaker 1: The harder you look for certainty, the better it hides.
Speaker 1: That night I lay awake, trying to fit the contradiction
Speaker 1: into words. A museum that reshapes itself, not in defiance
Speaker 1: of logic, but as a living record of shared expectation, memory,
Speaker 1: and desire. Perhaps, I mused, the strangeness was not a
Speaker 1: flaw at all. but the institution's most essential quality, the
Speaker 1: reason it had persisted, centuries on, without ever settling into
Speaker 1: a single version of itself. If so, then the problem
Speaker 1: wasn't in the museum, but in every sheet of paper
Speaker 1: that dared to bound it. And yet, something sharper began
Speaker 1: to gnaw at me. Among the oldest blueprints there was reference,
Speaker 1: again and again, to a sealed archive, a square, windowless
Speaker 1: room marked off at the heart of the original guild hall,
Speaker 1: A collector's chamber, one set of plans called it, with
Speaker 1: a door that should never open unto passage except at sundown.
Speaker 1: Later maps placed it near the second floor, inaccessible from
Speaker 1: any known hallway. I'd seen no trace of it in
Speaker 1: physical space. It was possible, of course, that the archive
Speaker 1: had long since been removed, walled up or repurposed, left
Speaker 1: off later architectural records. Yet its name, its insistent recurrence,
Speaker 1: piqued me. After two weeks of retreat and advance, of mapping, theorizing,
Speaker 1: and discreetly questioning the more tolerant staff, I decided to
Speaker 1: make a systematic search. I began by triangulating its possible
Speaker 1: location using a compilation of 27 different floor plans, cross-referenced
Speaker 1: through both physical measurement and archival photographs. One rainy afternoon,
Speaker 1: a Tuesday if memory serves, I found myself standing before
Speaker 1: a door I'd never seen, not remarkable in itself, given
Speaker 1: the building's sly mutability, but striking for its plainness. No sign,
Speaker 1: no handle polish, just all dark wood. It lay in
Speaker 1: a corridor that on yesterday's walk had led only to
Speaker 1: a bricked-over window. My memory rebelled, but the door yielded
Speaker 1: easily under pressure. Inside was air unmoved for decades, the
Speaker 1: hush of layered dust, the scent of old cardboard and
Speaker 1: faded linen. The archive had the proportions of a small chapel,
Speaker 1: and in the light from my phone, Even the faintest
Speaker 1: corners receded into gloom. Stacked chairs slumped like tired animals
Speaker 1: along the wall. Boxes were heaped with odd consistency, as
Speaker 1: if waiting to be catalogued, and then forgotten for another lifetime.
Speaker 1: I worked carefully, gloves on, not knowing whose family's treasures
Speaker 1: I might be disturbing. In a box labelled 1892-97, Brunner,
Speaker 1: I found them. Illustrated journals, thick with ink and the
Speaker 1: peculiar feverishness of obsession. The first entry began. Upon entering
Speaker 1: the museum, I am never entirely sure whether I am
Speaker 1: arriving or returning, nor am I certain the corridors know
Speaker 1: the difference. The curator's sketches were bold, labyrinthine, corners nested
Speaker 1: within other corners, rooms whose windows looked inward toward each other,
Speaker 1: stairways spiralling not up or down, but somehow sideways into space.
Speaker 1: One diagram nearly matched my own latest attempt at mapping
Speaker 1: the South Galleries. right down to the nomenclature of vanished
Speaker 1: rooms and a notation, walls with echoes amidst them. For months,
Speaker 1: the 1890s curator had wandered the building with compass and lantern,
Speaker 1: each day producing variations of the same map, none resembling
Speaker 1: the previous days, nor any of the official plans. He'd
Speaker 1: made notes of compass readings, needle stable here, near the
Speaker 1: portrait alcove it spins, always to the west, even as
Speaker 1: the hallway runs south. Elsewhere, Footsteps on the marble gallery
Speaker 1: sound hollow, space behind wall. When checked next day, corridor
Speaker 1: solid and unyielding. A watercolour from 1895 depicted a window
Speaker 1: to the sea, facing now, impossibly, into a walled courtyard.
Speaker 1: There were diagrams showing odd loops in the architecture. A
Speaker 1: corridor left and then left again, looping, yet never returning
Speaker 1: to its origin. Sketches of doorways that moved not in place,
Speaker 1: but in time. a door present only after storms, just
Speaker 1: before dusk. The passing of time had not dulled his curiosity,
Speaker 1: but he'd reached no solution. Plans refuse to fix themselves,
Speaker 1: he wrote in a trembling hand. Every attempt to regularize
Speaker 1: only increases the proliferation of corners. By the time I
Speaker 1: realized my own scrawls mirrored his, right down to impossible angles,
Speaker 1: I felt an odd kinship and a faint unease. This phenomenon,
Speaker 1: whatever its nature, was no recent development. It had been observed, mapped,
Speaker 1: and marvelled at, for over a hundred years, and perhaps
Speaker 1: since the building's very foundation. Summoning courage, I stepped back
Speaker 1: outside the archive, notebook trembling in my hand, heart humming
Speaker 1: not with fear, but with a kind of delighted humility.
Speaker 1: This was not a problem recently born of confusion, nor
Speaker 1: something I could simply fix. Instead, I was treading in
Speaker 1: the footsteps of generations of explorers, curators, engineers, poets, and dreamers,
Speaker 1: each of whom had walked these halls and wrestled with
Speaker 1: a building that had never, and would never, be perfectly known.
Speaker 1: I let the thick door to the forgotten archive fall
Speaker 1: quietly shut behind me. In the vacated hush, still hovering
Speaker 1: about that paper-laden room, I felt the echo of years, centuries,
Speaker 1: of other searchers. Not just me, or even the 1890s
Speaker 1: curator with his ink-stained fingertips, but the multitude whose footprints
Speaker 1: were now layered invisibly in the ever-renewing carpet piles and
Speaker 1: stone flags. That sense returned, more intense than before, not
Speaker 1: of fear, but of being joined in an ongoing experiment.
Speaker 1: The building was as much participant as vessel. I returned
Speaker 1: to the small back office where Sophia was logging activity slips,
Speaker 1: the last of the autumn sunlight draining off the windowpins
Speaker 1: behind her. Wordlessly, I slid one of the curator's journals
Speaker 1: across the desk. She regarded it without touching it, her
Speaker 1: brow briefly creasing. Where'd you turn this up? she asked softly.
Speaker 1: Down in the archive, I told her. She slid her
Speaker 1: glasses up, fanning the pages slowly, her lips forming silent
Speaker 1: exclamations as she paged through diagrams I recognised. Nested corners,
Speaker 1: stairways gone haywire, galleries connecting in mutually impossible ways. For
Speaker 1: a while we sat without talking, the persistent click and
Speaker 1: whir of the old scanner filling the silence. Eventually, Sophia said,
Speaker 1: I thought I'd seen every theory, shoddy renovations, tricks of
Speaker 1: the mind, even that old legend about doors only appearing
Speaker 1: at dusk. But this, she ran her thumb along the edge,
Speaker 1: it's more than a story, isn't it? Mark arrived, breathless
Speaker 1: and half-covered in plaster dust from the loading dock. Curiosity
Speaker 1: instantly peaked by the open spine and dense, surreal diagrams
Speaker 1: on Sophia's desk. I explained what I'd found. Impossible maps,
Speaker 1: experiments with compasses, the curator's attempts at definitive records. So
Speaker 1: it isn't just us, Mark said, excitement and relief warring
Speaker 1: in his face. It's always been this way, somehow. Elsa,
Speaker 1: shuffling past the open office door, stopped at our conversational
Speaker 1: gravity well. She scanned the page in Sophia's hand, then me.
Speaker 1: There's always been corners more than walls here, she pronounced,
Speaker 1: as if giving a verdict. Stories handed down since before
Speaker 1: I wore this jacket. My grandmother used to swear you
Speaker 1: could find the powder room from any spot if you
Speaker 1: simply wanted it badly enough. But next week, it's the
Speaker 1: kitchen that finds you first. Sophia looked up. Elsa, do
Speaker 1: you think it's the building, the plans, or us? Elsa shrugged.
Speaker 1: Why not a little of each? her eyes crinkled warmly,
Speaker 1: not evasive but content in ambiguity. That night my sleep
Speaker 1: was a welter of corners, corridors feeding on themselves, rooms
Speaker 1: blooming like unfurling flowers as I walked. In my dream journal,
Speaker 1: I wondered if the museum had always been waiting for
Speaker 1: a certain set of observers, as if, by attempting to
Speaker 1: resolve its contradictions, we perpetuated them, each person making their
Speaker 1: own geometry more solid by the attention itself. The next morning,
Speaker 1: under rain, I embarked on a more deliberate kind of inquiry,
Speaker 1: notebook and compass in hand. This time, I sought not
Speaker 1: simply to catch the building in contradiction, but to walk
Speaker 1: paths others had described or mapped before me, precisely as
Speaker 1: they'd remembered them, to see if the act of sharing
Speaker 1: a memory shaped what I could find. I'd recruit Mark
Speaker 1: for backup, giving him a tablet loaded with mapping software
Speaker 1: and strict instructions to log our path by GPS and
Speaker 1: digital compass every few steps. Sophia, game for a practical test,
Speaker 1: joined us for the morning, determined to take a shortcut,
Speaker 1: while Mark recreated his no-way-but-outside-route each group tracing as closely
Speaker 1: as possible the remembered instructions, accompanied by a witness for verification.
Speaker 1: We began at reception, Mark and Sophia leading their respective troops,
Speaker 1: each cheerfully contentious about whose path would prove superior. I
Speaker 1: trailed Sophia, recording steps, turns, and sights, down a wide
Speaker 1: timbered hallway, past the faded tapestry, up the shallowest third stair,
Speaker 1: right by the bust of Admiral Rouseau, and on through
Speaker 1: a little green archway. Her shortcut came off without a hitch,
Speaker 1: the press of familiar objects snapping into place in a
Speaker 1: kind of comforting sequence. After she deposited us on the
Speaker 1: threshold of the library, she handed me back my notebook,
Speaker 1: which I realized was missing an entire page, a sheet
Speaker 1: I'd filled just yesterday with notes about a tight-winding corridor
Speaker 1: and a cracked glass skylight. When I questioned her about it,
Speaker 1: she shrugged. I always end up here. I don't worry
Speaker 1: the details so much. We regrouped and switched. Mark led,
Speaker 1: with me and Elsa in tow. This path led out
Speaker 1: through the modern rotunda, along a wind-lashed gallery, and in
Speaker 1: through a door I'd always thought was locked. Twenty-one steps more,
Speaker 1: and by some spatial cheat, we arrived at the same
Speaker 1: end point, albeit facing an entirely different wall. The floor
Speaker 1: tiles beneath my feet didn't match my previous map. The
Speaker 1: orientation was reversed, as if I'd exited the building and
Speaker 1: re-entered from the opposite direction. Afterward, Mark compared logs. His
Speaker 1: GPS traces flickered, the lines squiggling, and then drifting halfway
Speaker 1: out of the building's footprint mid-route. It's as if the
Speaker 1: satellites can't decide where we are, he said, not quite disappointed,
Speaker 1: more deeply amused. Over lunch, we sketched our respective routes.
Speaker 1: No two diagrams agreed. My shortcut, Sophia's path, Mark's outside circuit,
Speaker 1: all different, but each worked. each led reliably from point
Speaker 1: A to B when the originator guided. When another tried
Speaker 1: to replicate the same, minor differences compounded. A window became
Speaker 1: a blank wall, a side door replaced by a coat rack,
Speaker 1: a landing stretched. Elsa, buttering her roll with deliberate care,
Speaker 1: watched this with only mild surprise. The museum has never
Speaker 1: been easily summarized, she said. You show it your feet,
Speaker 1: it shows you new toes. Driven now by this growing clarity,
Speaker 1: the building adapted to the observer or to intention, I
Speaker 1: arranged for a larger test, a group mapping race. Sophia,
Speaker 1: Mark and Elsa each chosen to lead, with staff and
Speaker 1: visitors split among them, racing to reach the red suite
Speaker 1: by any route they deemed optimal, each group equipped with
Speaker 1: coloured chalk to mark their passage. It was a strangely
Speaker 1: festive sight, little piles of pink, yellow and green chalk
Speaker 1: at various intersections, lines arrowing off in divergent directions, looping
Speaker 1: up stairs and around corners. I joined a team at random,
Speaker 1: purposefully not choosing the usual leader, to see if my
Speaker 1: own journey would feel the same. When all parties finally
Speaker 1: assembled at the Red Suite, everyone agreed. Each route, though
Speaker 1: mutually incompatible on paper, worked seamlessly in the moment, corridors, landings,
Speaker 1: and rooms arranging themselves in a series of logical, if unaligned, sequences.
Speaker 1: the patterns of chalk told a story. Not a single
Speaker 1: group's lines overlapped entirely, even when passing through the same
Speaker 1: key junctions. Comparing notes, we found contradictory claims about which
Speaker 1: room adjoined the main hall, which staircase led up or down,
Speaker 1: and where a particular window offered its unlikely daylight. Dr. Newman,
Speaker 1: the visiting mathematician whose curiosity had been piqued by Mark's
Speaker 1: offhand comments about non-Euclidean quirks, attended that afternoon He was
Speaker 1: tall and swift-stepping, with an accent that swam somewhere between
Speaker 1: Vienna and Cape Town, and eyes that darted keenly around
Speaker 1: each fresh contradiction as if delighted by surprise. He asked
Speaker 1: to see the old plans, the curator's sketches, the staff's
Speaker 1: failed maps, even my own battered attempts at master plans.
Speaker 1: Humming lightly, he reversed a chair and began to sketch
Speaker 1: on the back of a paper placemat. Mathematically, this is
Speaker 1: not impossible, he said, running his pencil in lazy, murbius loops.
Speaker 1: very unlikely for human buildings, but the universe admits much
Speaker 1: stranger topology. The museum could, unwittingly, be transitioning between contiguous,
Speaker 1: semi-stable spatial states. What exactly does that mean, in normal language?
Speaker 1: I pressed, half exasperated, half gleeful. He grinned, that perhaps
Speaker 1: the building is not only mapped differently by each person,
Speaker 1: but formed differently too. Imagine a sheet of paper with
Speaker 1: multiple folds. A path changes each time you fold new
Speaker 1: corners together. The traveller walks the crease most available to
Speaker 1: their intention, their attention, or, if you like, their memory.
Speaker 1: Elsa laughed aloud at that. That's the best answer I've
Speaker 1: heard in fifty years. It won't fix a leaky roof,
Speaker 1: but it would explain why everybody is always so lost
Speaker 1: and so certain at once. Spurred by Newman's analogy, we
Speaker 1: conducted another odd test. Standing at a T-intersection, I asked Dr.
Speaker 1: Newman to describe the path from the south stair to
Speaker 1: the upstairs clock gallery. Using his instructions, I walked forward.
Speaker 1: Elsa shadowed along a memory lane of her own method.
Speaker 1: Mark tried to reconcile textbook navigation with his own recollections.
Speaker 1: Each of us ended up elsewhere. Yet, when returned to
Speaker 1: the starting point, our own routes worked as long as
Speaker 1: we trusted only our own memory or followed our personal guide.
Speaker 1: If a group attempted to mix instructions, one person's shortcut,
Speaker 1: another's detour, the hallways doubled back, merged, thinned, or thickened
Speaker 1: in odd ways, sometimes ending in featureless white walls. The
Speaker 1: maps we constructed afterward bore out the impossibility. Entire chambers
Speaker 1: were positioned in physically exclusive spaces, more than once occupying
Speaker 1: the very footprint of another gallery, yet both demonstrably, experientially
Speaker 1: real to their visitors. By now, we had established a pattern.
Speaker 1: The museum had always been like this, its internal geometry
Speaker 1: shaped not only by masonry and timber, but by our
Speaker 1: overlapping and conflicting perceptions. The curator's journals, Elsa's folk wisdom,
Speaker 1: Sophia's flexible navigation, Mark's digital experiments, Dr. Newman's mathematical musings,
Speaker 1: all pointed to a building that was less a container
Speaker 1: and more an engine of possibility. But not everyone was convinced.
Speaker 1: The maintenance staff, practical to the last, stuck to their
Speaker 1: own theories. Secret doors, ventilation shafts, capped-off corridors, expansion joints
Speaker 1: gone haywire. They humoured us, perhaps, but continued to chart
Speaker 1: the shortest safe paths in person each day, never relying
Speaker 1: on last week's instructions. The building lacks a bit of mystery, sure,
Speaker 1: said one, but water pipes know where they belong. Still,
Speaker 1: even the most sceptical began to concede something was at
Speaker 1: work beyond the ordinary. On rainy days, Dr Newman noted,
Speaker 1: the GPS glitches intensified, sometimes producing location, jumps of 20 metres.
Speaker 1: Light through windows sometimes bent at the wrong angle, illuminating
Speaker 1: parts of the floor that shouldn't see sun until another hour.
Speaker 1: The cleaning staff reported closets that widened or narrowed between shifts,
Speaker 1: storage rooms that seemed pregnant with a space neither measured
Speaker 1: nor catalogue. accessible only when an item was truly needed. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: my own views shifted, tangibly, in that the more I
Speaker 1: attempted to construct a definitive map on my own, the
Speaker 1: more my diagrams spiralled into Baroque confusion. The best I
Speaker 1: achieved was a kind of cartographical collage, overlapping sketches, faded blueprints,
Speaker 1: and coloured pathways tangled like threads. It became obvious that
Speaker 1: the pursuit of a single, correct, Floor plan was itself
Speaker 1: a category mistake, one rooted not in the building, but
Speaker 1: in our expectation that a space could ever be rendered
Speaker 1: in only one version of itself. Sophia, ever practical, proposed
Speaker 1: a final experiment. Let's each draw our own map, not
Speaker 1: what we think the building's supposed to be, but what
Speaker 1: we actually experience walking it, start to finish, every room
Speaker 1: and junction, no cheating by blueprints or old photographs. If
Speaker 1: the museum only ever matches the map in the eye
Speaker 1: of the traveller, let's see whose journey is real for whom.
Speaker 1: We agreed. Sophia, Dr Newman, Mark, and I would each
Speaker 1: walk the entire expanse, from the base of the old stair,
Speaker 1: through every gallery, up and down every floor and wing,
Speaker 1: recording only what we saw, what our feet found solid,
Speaker 1: not what was supposed to exist or had existed yesterday.
Speaker 1: We would leave small markers, paper clips, sticky notes, an
Speaker 1: arrangement of coins. at forks and doors to track our passage,
Speaker 1: each careful not to follow in the exact footsteps of
Speaker 1: the others. Three days were allotted to the task. In
Speaker 1: the evenings, we gathered in the staff room, comparing notes.
Speaker 1: Each of us produced a sketch, a tangle of passageways, rooms, nodes.
Speaker 1: And then, the moment of truth, maps laid outside by
Speaker 1: side atop the lacquered archive table, placed over transparencies of
Speaker 1: the latest digital plans and the old curator's diagrams. The
Speaker 1: differences were, if anything, more profound than expected. Sophia's plan
Speaker 1: had a sunlit atrium set right at the juncture of
Speaker 1: the north and west wings, with a shortcut directly to
Speaker 1: the conservation suite. I remembered only a length of windowless
Speaker 1: corridor and three right-angled turns. Mark's route included a disused
Speaker 1: service stair appearing twice, once near the kitchen, once looping
Speaker 1: up near the sculpture garden. Newman's S was most boldly abstract,
Speaker 1: corridors turning into merbius strips, rooms written as nodes rather
Speaker 1: than rectangles, with connections sometimes charted as potential rather than fixed.
Speaker 1: The paperclip markers proved what we already knew. When any
Speaker 1: of us attempted to follow someone else's map, objects and
Speaker 1: nooks appeared or vanished, as if the museum responded to
Speaker 1: the expectations brought along. Elsa, given a stack of these
Speaker 1: new diagrams, tried each for herself, announcing her arrival in
Speaker 1: the wrong gallery with a brisk. No, not this way.
Speaker 1: Never in fifty years. In short, there was no definitive map,
Speaker 1: none that captured all realities. none that worked equally for
Speaker 1: more than one person at a time. The only constant
Speaker 1: was the building's readiness to supply each traveller with a
Speaker 1: trustworthy journey, as long as the act of seeking was genuine.
Speaker 1: The implications shivered out through the staff. Some, like Sophia,
Speaker 1: found it a kind of comfort. It means the museum
Speaker 1: is never finished, always something undiscovered, even for us. For others,
Speaker 1: like Mark, it instilled humility. We can digitize until the
Speaker 1: day we die and still never get it all down. Dr. Newman,
Speaker 1: now in his element, gave a gentle blackboard lesson before dinner,
Speaker 1: gathering staff and a few visitors in the echoing lecture hall.
Speaker 1: Suppose we think in terms of topology, a manifold, if
Speaker 1: you will, not constrained by three-dimensional embedding, he said, chalk-scrawling
Speaker 1: lines that doubled back on themselves. Space itself can be
Speaker 1: locally consistent. Each person's journey feels real, reliable. but globally,
Speaker 1: contradictions multiply and refuse collapse. The very attempt to measure,
Speaker 1: to pin down, causes reconfiguration. Like a quantum system, collapse
Speaker 1: the state and the outcome's yours, but the next observer
Speaker 1: finds their own certainty irreconcilable with the last. He must
Speaker 1: have noticed my bemused, sceptical look. You think the building
Speaker 1: is deliberately playing tricks? I asked. He shook his head.
Speaker 1: Not tricks, not malice, just a peculiar kind of openness.
Speaker 1: We designed her this way, perhaps without meaning to. Successive architects, additions, traditions,
Speaker 1: each layering intention atop intention, need atop memory. As more
Speaker 1: people walked her halls, expecting different things, the more routes
Speaker 1: became possible. Now the only truth is the one you find.
Speaker 1: That hypothesis hovered above our heads as echoes died away.
Speaker 1: I thought of the old curator, his compulsive mappings. of
Speaker 1: Elsa's stories, Sophia's quick detours, Mark's hopeful experiments, of the
Speaker 1: men and women who, over centuries, had made their own
Speaker 1: way through the museum, each believing in the fixity of walls,
Speaker 1: the certainty of corners, only to discover their own itinerary
Speaker 1: was all that solidified space for them. Late that week,
Speaker 1: as leaves slipped into gutters and visitors, footsteps faded with
Speaker 1: the season, I sat in the library reviewing guest books
Speaker 1: from decades past, fragile, they cleaved, with their uneven copper
Speaker 1: plate and schoolboy scrawls. One entry from 1912 read, Found
Speaker 1: the yellow door again today, but it led not to
Speaker 1: the sunny portrait gallery as always, but to a music
Speaker 1: room no one now recalls. A better fate than being lost,
Speaker 1: I suppose. Another, 1957, told the child we'd find the
Speaker 1: Egyptian bust, in our search, stumbled instead into a gallery
Speaker 1: of ship's clocks. Next time I will expect less, and
Speaker 1: perhaps find more. It wasn't only staff I saw, but
Speaker 1: every visitor, each importing their own hopes, their own expectations,
Speaker 1: and thus, in some quiet, unprovable way, tweaking the pattern
Speaker 1: of rooms and halls. Memory became form, desire folded space.
Speaker 1: News of our definitive mapping experiment reached the ears of regulars,
Speaker 1: and a few locals still curious about the building they'd
Speaker 1: known all their lives. One late afternoon, A woman named Mrs.
Speaker 1: Kovacs settled next to me on a library bench. Her
Speaker 1: cane looped through the armrest with unconscious grace. She looked
Speaker 1: over the mess of papers with a little shake of
Speaker 1: her head. My husband drew trams for forty years. Maps
Speaker 1: don't matter half so much as the journey, she said,
Speaker 1: as if delivering a proverb. In this city, you learn quickly,
Speaker 1: expect detours, discover neighbourhoods. The museum is the city in miniature.
Speaker 1: A map is nothing. Only the journey is true. With
Speaker 1: all that in mind, the final pieces slid together, not
Speaker 1: in a moment of mystical revelation, but as the steady
Speaker 1: accumulation of too many lived contradictions to ignore. The building
Speaker 1: persisted not because its geometry was kept secret or its
Speaker 1: plans mislaid, but because it was continually remade by the
Speaker 1: layering of expectation and memory. The collective focus, each person
Speaker 1: seeking what they wanted or needed, shaped the possible routes,
Speaker 1: locked in the arrangement for the duration of the journey. Dr.
Speaker 1: Newman met my eye as I mulled this, approving as
Speaker 1: if I'd solved a riddle on my own. The Heisenberg
Speaker 1: principle of architecture, he pronounced. The more precisely you attempt
Speaker 1: to measure the museum, the less fixed it remains. Only
Speaker 1: your own path can ever be certain. The building's gift
Speaker 1: is to allow possibility to survive. Most spaces wither into utility,
Speaker 1: not this one. Sophia added, and sometimes what you find
Speaker 1: isn't what you started seeking. which I suppose is the lesson.
Speaker 1: Behind the rhinus, I sensed real affection, for the building,
Speaker 1: for its untidiness, for the impossibility of ever cataloguing it fully.
Speaker 1: In those final days of our experiment, the meaning of
Speaker 1: the museum changed for me. I'd begun believing I was
Speaker 1: puzzling out a technical error, bad carpentry, fuzzy accounting, some
Speaker 1: reckless renovation. Then I thought it was a trick, a
Speaker 1: centuries-old joke maintained by keepers of secret routes. Then, for
Speaker 1: a moment, I suspected something more sinister, a game at
Speaker 1: the traveller's expense. But what I found was softer, stranger,
Speaker 1: and infinitely more interesting. A place made, maintained, and continually
Speaker 1: re-enchanted by the simple act of coming through it. The
Speaker 1: geometry of Forever Corners, I realised, was the geometry of participation.
Speaker 1: The building did not so much defy the laws of
Speaker 1: mathematics as reveal a deeper one. That certainty belonged only
Speaker 1: to the observer, that reality settled, ever so gently, wherever
Speaker 1: curiosity and attention placed it that day. Not a failure
Speaker 1: of construction, but an achievement, one continually renewed, never to
Speaker 1: be finished. In the last hours of my mapping marathon,
Speaker 1: knowing now what to look for, or rather, what not
Speaker 1: to hope to pin down, I returned to walking with intention,
Speaker 1: but no anxiety. I allowed memory and desire to guide me,
Speaker 1: tasting the delight of being almost, but never quite, lost.
Speaker 1: Elsa found me outside the cloakroom, humming some melody without words.
Speaker 1: Have you finished your grand survey then? she asked, a
Speaker 1: half-smile tucked into the corners of her mouth. No, I replied,
Speaker 1: and I don't suppose I ever will, but that seems
Speaker 1: all right with me. Good, she said. It was never
Speaker 1: about the maps, you know. It's about finding something new
Speaker 1: each time. In the following days, I let go of
Speaker 1: the compulsion to catalogue. The building became not less orderly,
Speaker 1: but infinitely more inviting, a place whose weirdness offered not frustration,
Speaker 1: but the enduring spark of novelty. I deliberately took new
Speaker 1: ways each day, accepting whatever string of corners presented itself.
Speaker 1: I found myself noticing small things I'd somehow missed before.
Speaker 1: A chipped freeze above a doorway, a brass plaque in
Speaker 1: a sunbeam, long dulled but warm to the touch. the
Speaker 1: laughter of visitors echoing from somewhere I could not have
Speaker 1: reached by direct route. Disagreements about the fastest path or
Speaker 1: the right hallway became jokes, miniature contests smiled over in
Speaker 1: the staff room. Sophia and I traded stories of our
Speaker 1: most recent shortcut discoveries. Mark, predictably, built an online submission
Speaker 1: form where visitors could share odd routes and encounters. Dr. Newman, meanwhile,
Speaker 1: promised to write a paper, Half Mathematical Treatise, half-gentle apology
Speaker 1: to Euclid, that would mystify his peers and delight those
Speaker 1: who liked a puzzle with no closure. One bright morning,
Speaker 1: some weeks after the mapping grand finale, I sat in
Speaker 1: the sun-dappled courtyard café, a mug of tea warming my palms.
Speaker 1: The museum's thick walls rose on all sides, their surfaces
Speaker 1: battered by as many years as there were forgotten corners inside.
Speaker 1: Around me, the aromas of weak coffee and brine, the
Speaker 1: timeless scent of stone dust, children's shouts, the conversational burble
Speaker 1: of strangers. I watched the staff come and go through
Speaker 1: different doors, each seeming right to them. Visitors drifted from
Speaker 1: gallery to gallery, some in pairs, some alone, and I thought,
Speaker 1: perhaps every building harbours its hidden corners, waiting for the
Speaker 1: right explorer. Perhaps every life does too, if we allow
Speaker 1: ourselves to journey without hoping to know every corner in advance.
Speaker 1: The museum stands, not as a monument to confusion, but
Speaker 1: as a reminder of the pleasure of searching, the delight
Speaker 1: of not knowing how every hallway ends. The map will
Speaker 1: never match the walk. The walk, not the map, is
Speaker 1: always true. How many corners does a place, or a life,
Speaker 1: contain if in all our journeys we're never quite finished
Speaker 1: drawing its map? And that is the end. Thank you
Speaker 1: for listening, and I will see you in the next one.