Building

There is a crack in the wall of every old French house that tells you more than the estate agent ever will.

Follow it with your finger – from the lintel down through the plaster, past the place where someone filled it in 1973 and the place where someone else filled it in 1921 – and you are reading a kind of autobiography. The house has been settling into itself for centuries. It is not finished. It will never be finished. This is the first thing you learn about building: that it is not an event but a condition.

Maison Les Buis was a nunnery, then a courtyard farm, and now a place where artists come to work. The stones don't mind. They have been reused so many times – a barn wall becomes a bedroom, loose stones reshape a boundary wall – that they have forgotten what they were first. The French call this ‘remploi,’ which makes it sound administrative, but there is something tender about it. You are saying to the stone, “You are not done yet.” “You have more to give.” I like to think that words work the same way. You lay them down, someone else picks them up, and the wall keeps growing.