Welcome to The Library

Before the curl of the left-hand staircase is an archway leading into the Library.

The floor is crowded with oriental rugs, overlapping the entire span of the room that extends the depth of the House. The deflated leather sofas and buttoned armchairs inside were gathered from the three other salon type corners of the House, as it was arranged so many years ago, and placed haphazard around cheap folding tables and ornately carved wooden pedestals in this one room. 

Like every other room in the House, you know this room. With its secret passageways behind bookshelves and the familiar green glass of the banker's lamps on every table, the rolling ladders, and the smell of old bindings. The crown molding is dusty and it frames the straight-backed misfit collective of bookshelves along the walls. These bookshelves and the books contained within are modest in number, if you consider the breadth of infinity and its possibilities, and only slightly above average if you consider the fact that they belong to several people.

A game of chess sits unfinished, the black knight knocked over and rolled to rest at the center of the board. Books are splayed in readiness, taken from the stacks Brad has left, to hold the place of his research into the cinematic depiction of dreams in the new millennium. The cardigan he wears against the draft from the floorboards is the color of baby chick down and lays in a pool nearby, topped with an empty pack of Camel cigarettes.

The complete Shadowplay entries available here.

The complete Home of Happiness entries available here.

The Library is where the Family does a lot of the discovery of the things they can't bear to hear from each other about themselves. You'll notice the books start to get organized in order of relevance to certain metaphysical or psychological profiles they're working up, the stories they've found themselves in and how they relate to others. This place and the books inside are filled with the answers to every mystery of who you really are and all the places you've been.

We, the Gray Family, don’t really believe there’s a difference between our categories. All playlists could be considered confessions, all dreams are memories of past lives, all secret worlds come with their own philosophies and that relationship is just the definition of mythology. Everything in Gray House, without exception, could be said to be a game of identity. Let’s be real, literature is visual art because you experience it with your eyes. This categorical arrangement of things is just a lot of blurry lines to give the impression of organization in the dense collision of meaning and experience that we have to sift through in this House. To try and explain the otherwise unexplainable. To put any words we can find onto the magic we touch every day. Enjoy, but don’t be afraid to get lost.