The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 85

How expected a house looks when it becomes a site for builders, how stripped of sanctity, when a room, once intimate, becomes mere space! Jack's cottage (whose interior I had never seen until now) had been reduced -- without side wall of middle flooring -- to pure builder's space, and at this stage of building was still pure space, like the space within the ruined stone-walled house with the big sycamores further along the droveway. Somewhere in that space Jack had made his bravest decision, to leave his death-bed for the last Christmas season with his friends, in the so ordinary public house not far from the end of the droveway. And that was the space to which -- with what illness, delirium, resignation, or perhaps reconciliation -- he had returned to die.