On the Threshold
June 1st, 2009
The image of the threshold, as the literal limit of the house and as the metaphorical limit of the self in respect to the other and to death, has long been a preoccupation of mine. I first encountered it in the work of Martin Heidegger, in either Poetry, Language, Thought or in On the Way to Language, I think, though I do not have the inclination to go check my notes at the moment. He says something like, “The threshold is always stony, because it bears the doorway, because it sustains the middle in which the outside and the inside penetrate each other. The threshold bears the between, and pain has petrified it.”
I was arrested by this image of the threshold and by Heidegger’s characterization of it as a place, not where the inside is separated from the outside, but where the inside and the outside penetrate each other. I saw the threshold suddenly as representing the philosophical limits that preoccupied me, between life and death, between self and other, between home and world, and this image made me realize how the separations marked by these philosophical limits were penetrating each other, bleeding into each other, petrifying their own limits with pain.
I became deeply involved with this image of the threshold, and I began to find it everywhere, in everything I read. I started making note of these references in a file that has taken several forms over the years, including a shortish novel and a longish poem, neither of which are presentable at the moment, mostly because I am constantly finding additional references that I keep appending to them in a haphazard way.
Even during the short time that I have been writing this blog, I have run across several instances of the threshold image in my reading, and I was tempted to write about them each time but was never sure how to introduce the subject. There seemed no way to explain adequately how important the image of the threshold was to me except to rehearse each instance of it that I have come upon, except to offer each iteration of the writing it has prompted in me, except to provide the kind of comprehensive introduction to the subject that would grossly exceed the limitations of this medium.
I have often reflected over the past months, however, that the absence of the threshold image has made the space of this blog misrepresenative of me, at least in this one significant respect. Though the threshold is an essential part of how I understand many of the subjects that I have already discussed, such as the relation to the home and to the other, I have left it almost unmentioned, because I did not know how to introduce it satisfactorily.
Several weeks ago, however, I was reading Martin Buber’s I and Thou with Tom Able, and I came across a passage that invoked the image of the threshold in a remarkable way. As soon as I read it, I decided that I could no longer avoid some sort of introduction to the idea of the threshold, and I have been trying to do so ever since, writing draft after draft of this post, but producing nothing very satisfactory. So, rather than struggle any further, I will let what I have written to this point stand, though I find it almost entirely unsatisfactory, and I will try instead to begin working out the image of threshold through the passage that Tom and I encountered in Buber. I quote it in entirety, despite its length:
“The man to whom freedom is guaranteed does not feel oppressed by causality. He knows that this mortal life is by its very nature an oscillation between You and It, and he senses the meaning of this. It suffices him that again and again he may set foot on the threshold of the sanctuary in which he may never tarry. Indeed, having to leave it again and again is for him an intimate part of the meaning and the destiny of this life. There, on the threshold, the response, the spirit is kindled in him again and again; here, in the unholy and indigent land the spark has to prove itself. What is here called necessity cannot frighten it; for there he recognized true necessity: fate.”
The threshold that Buber is describing here adds a new dimension to the image for me. Previously, I had primarily conceived of the threshold in several respects, as the limit between life and death, between myself and the other, and between the public and the private, though there are many less significant aspects of this image for me also. Buber, however, is using the image of the threshold to describe something that is different from all of these things, though I think that it is strongly related to them as well. His threshold is between the world of the It and the world of the You, between the world as I experience it as an object and the world as I engage it as a relation.
His argument is that it is not possible to exist solely in the ideal sanctuary of the You-world, but that life is a constant oscillation between experiencing the world as It and encountering the world as You. For this reason, freedom does not consist in being able to remain in the world of the You, because this is always impossible. Freedom consists in encountering the world of the You and then returning to the world of the It, again and again, continually. In other words, freedom consists in the crossing of the threshold, even and especially because this crossing must always be repeated.
The pain of the threshold, the crossing and recrossing, is where freedom is found, because the unholy and indigent land of the It-world constantly drives me to cross into the sanctuary of the You-world, and because the You-world constantly drives me to prove its spark in the It-world. To be free, it is not necessary to dwell in the sanctuary, only to set my foot on its threshold, again and again, though I know that I may never tarry there. It suffices to cross and recross that threshold in such a way that the spark of the sanctuary can prove itself in the unholy and indigent land.
This freedom of the threshold, Buber suggests, is a freedom to face the necessity of the It-world in light of recognizing fate in the You-world. Though I cannot live continually the fatefulness of the You-world, once I recognize it, I need no longer fear what appears to be necessity in the It-world. This implies, in terms of my own understanding of the threshold image, that though I am incapable of living what lies beyond the threshold of death, and though I am incapable of living what lies beyond the threshold of the other, the fatefulness that I recognize on these thresholds allows me to return to life and to myself without fearing what appears to be necessity in them.
In this way, I experience the fate of fatefulness of death and the other as a kind of anticipation and projection, as a kind of fear and anxiety, as a kind of hope and desire. My relation to death and to the other becomes, not an absolute crossing of the threshold, but a crossing in advance that returns me to life and myself in freedom, that returns me with a desire to cross these thresholds again and again, to occupy them, to petrify them with the pain of my crossing and my occupation, in order to have the spark of the You kindled in me continually and to have it proved in me continually also, in the unholy and indigent land.
16 Responses to “On the Threshold”
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From Word to Word by Jeremy Luke Hill is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
June 1st, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Perhaps you could accumulate references/notes on ‘the threshold’ in the spirit of Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Project’. The project would become one of classifying and organizing and rearranging and placing in new context, exploring the threshold, if you will, between your voice and the voices of others…
June 2nd, 2009 at 7:11 am
D,
Yes, that might be an idea, and it is close enough to what I am doing already to cause me little labour. I had been thinking of doing something more formal, along the lines of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, which I have been reading lately, but this would require more time and energy than I have at the moment.
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:03 am
[...] morning I read Luke’s discussion of the threshold, and his use of a quotation from Heidegger (“The threshold is always stony…“) put me [...]
June 2nd, 2009 at 8:10 pm
While I do not like to be insistent that, because I belong to the particular view, then the world must be seen that way. However it keeps coming up, not as a vice grip of view, but as something all your reading and perspectives seem to be pointing toward- this post almost above all the rest. Existentialism! Do you have an abhorence, an aversion? Your favourite author is Fyodor D. Yet, Luke, you don’t seem to have even a passing interest about it. Try some Nietzsche, Kierkergard. And if you want magnificence, read Albert Camus’ The Fall. Unless you have already, then I will stop talking out my ass.
June 2nd, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Curtis,
I have read some small amount of Nietzche, a rather larger amount of Kierkegaard, and a good bit of Camus, including The Fall. It may be difficult for me to answer your question though, because the word ‘existentialism’ has come to mean a variety of things, not all of them very true to the word’s origins, and I may or may not be responding to the meaning that you intend. If, however, you merely mean the basic idea that existence precedes essence, I would say that this is a valuable idea, but that it makes assumptions about being as such that not warranted. If you wanted to read about the problem of being in this sense, I would recommend that you start with Heidegger and then follow it with some of the poststructuralists (my affection is for Derrida, but there are several who take up Heidegger’s question of being). If you are really interested, you can borrow these books from me, and I also have some secondary material that will help you get through the work of reading this stuff.
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:45 am
I feel very tiny. I have no idea what you are now talking about. Esp. the part about ‘existence precedes essence.’ Not even the slightest clue what that might mean. What struck me about this was the idea of staring into the abyss, or other, being alternated into thresholds, an internalisation, then a fast from ‘the brinks’, then dive in again. Crossing the line tests us, and transforms us etc. The only exception here seems to be that you come across an approach that makes these two polarities or opposites, strike a homogeneous chord, as well as making the abysmal brinks much more common.
June 3rd, 2009 at 1:11 am
I suppose to clarify, having tracked down a surmise that greatly helps what I meant, as ‘existential’:
‘I am myself and my circumstances.’ Ortega y Gasset, as Wikipedia extrapolates this point, …’the human existence must always be defined as the individual person combined with the concrete circumstances of [their] life.’
So as you were impacted, that to live inside the self perception is impossible, it must include, and in truth expose the internal person to the circumstances. The existential is immediate where your inward and the circumstantial begin to chaff and fray one another, but also to the extent that they are painfully homogeneously dependant upon one another. It is a basic frame work.
June 3rd, 2009 at 1:13 am
And indeed Martin Buber has his own little homage in the research I just momentarily did. Sorry to hijack this entry.
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:40 am
Curtis,
There is no need to feel tiny. This is exactly why I wanted to clarify what you meant by existentialism, because the term is often used very loosely. The phrase, “Existence preceded essence,” is the standard, if somewhat reductive, formula of existentialism. It means, to be only slightly less reductive, that the essence of my being is formed after I come into being, after I come into existence, by my own will and by my own circumstances. It is opposed to the assumption that the essence of my being is determined before I come into existence, by nature or by God or whatever, and that I can do little to alter this being.
As I said, I have books that you can borrow if you would like to explore the subject further.
June 4th, 2009 at 10:33 am
Luke,
If you don’t mind, could you look up the place where the threshold quote originates? I would like to read the wider context where it appears.
June 4th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
D,
Yes, I apologize for my laziness.
The section comes from an essay called “Language”, which can be found in Poetry, Language, and Thought. In it, Heidegger is discussing a poem by Georg Trakl called “A Winter Evening” (a poem that has some other resonant imagery for me also), and he is analysing the line where Trakl says, “Pain has turned the threshold to stone.” The larger passage, found on page 204 in my edition, and translated by Albert Hofstadter, reads as follows:
“The threshold is the ground-beam that bears the doorway as a whole. It sustains the middle in which the two, the outside and the inside, penetrate each other. The threshold bears the between. What goes out and goes in, in the between, is joined in the between’s dependability. The dependability of the middle must never yield either way. The settling of the between needs something that can endure, and is in this sense hard. The threshold, as the settlement of the between, is hard because pain has petrified it. But the pain that became appropriated to stone did not harden into the threshold to congeal there. The pain presences unflagging in the threshold, as pain.
June 4th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Cheers!
June 5th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
after reading this longish thread wherein people discuss things which not only make me feel tiny (and given my physical size, that is an unusual feeling indeed!) I fear I might just become invisible altogether…or non-existent…is there a non-existentialism theory I don’t know about?
My purpose in engaging in this discussion is to share my own undertanding and experience of the “threshold” which is something quite different than the experience of crossing back and forth or even looking in or out depending on where you are in relation to the threshold. It seems to me there is quite another experience of the threshold…one of perfect stillness in a space which is neither here nor there, in or out. It can be experienced not so much as a settlement of the in between, not so much a inter- penetration of the inside and outside, but a space where neither exists at all. An entirely liminal space where boundaries of any kind disappear and even pain cease to exist. It is a place of stillness perhaps full of anticipation or expectancy, but a stillness and peace in which one might pause in the every day moment with the words shalom across the lintel to give one wings.
June 5th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Mum,
It is interesting that you should mention this idea of stillness, because I was talking with a friend today about how it may not be possible to “tarry”, to use Buber’s word, in the sanctuary, it may still be possible to tarry on the threshold, where the boundaries that form the threshold do indeed seem to disappear. We can mull the idea further when I am up to the Island in a few weeks.
August 12th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
[...] wrote on the image of the threshold a few months ago, and I have been wanting ever since to supplement this discussion with a few [...]
September 20th, 2009 at 8:45 am
[...] written several times on the image of the threshold, both in a more or less philosophical mode (On the Threshold and The Door, the Threshold, the Between) and also in a more poetical mode (On the Scaffold), [...]