The Doorway

In the First Country, the people believed that everything began with things.

They told the story often.

There was a Tree, they said, and there was a Stone. The Tree stood upon the hill, and the Stone lay beneath it. The Tree was taller than the Stone. The Stone was heavier than the Tree. They were two things, each complete in itself, and only afterwards did they acquire their relations.

The people found this arrangement comforting.

For if things came first, then the world was simple.

First there were things.

Then there were the threads between them.

And so they imagined the world as a great collection of objects, with invisible cords stretched between them: near, far, heavier, lighter, inside, outside, before, after.

The things were real.

The relations merely told you how the things happened to be arranged.

No one questioned this until the day the King built a wall.

The wall divided the palace into two chambers.

On one side was the Hall of Guests.

On the other was the Garden of Bells.

The King ordered that a doorway be made between them.

The masons cut an opening into the wall and placed a great wooden door within it.

When the door stood open, the people walked from the Hall into the Garden. They carried cups, crossed the threshold, heard the bells, and returned.

When the door was shut, the two chambers seemed to become two different worlds.

The people began to speak strangely about the doorway.

“This is a passage,” said one.

“No,” said another. “It is an obstruction.”

“It is inside.”

“It is outside.”

“It belongs to the Hall.”

“It belongs to the Garden.”

The old philosophers came to inspect it.

They examined the hinges.

They measured the wood.

They studied the stones around the frame.

They agreed that the doorway was an object.

But a young girl, who had been listening silently, asked:

“Then why does it change the world when the door is opened?”

The philosophers were displeased.

“It changes nothing,” said the eldest. “The rooms remain where they were.”

“Yes,” said the girl.

“The wall remains where it was.”

“Yes.”

“The door itself remains the same door.”

“Yes.”

“Then what has changed?”

No philosopher answered.

For the door had not become a different thing.

Yet suddenly people could pass where they could not pass before.

The Garden, which had been beyond reach, had become accessible.

The Hall, which had been enclosed, had become connected to elsewhere.

Nothing had changed in the inventory of things.

But the kingdom of possibilities had changed.

The girl returned the next morning.

The door was locked.

She stood before it for a long time.

“What is different?” she asked.

Again, the philosophers came.

Again, they inspected the wood, the hinges, the frame.

“The door is the same,” they said.

“But the passage is gone.”

They looked at one another.

And slowly, reluctantly, they began to understand.

The door did not merely stand between two places.

It established a relation between them.

It made one place a place from which another could be reached.

It made the other a place to which passage was possible.

And when the relation changed, the possibilities changed with it.

The two rooms had not ceased to exist.

They had ceased to be the same for one another.

This troubled the philosophers greatly.

For they had always believed that a relation was something like a rope thrown between two things.

The things existed first.

The rope came afterwards.

But now they wondered whether some of the ropes were more like doors.

Perhaps a relation did not merely join things.

Perhaps it distinguished the ways in which things could meet.

Perhaps it determined not merely where something was, but what it could be for something else.

The King heard of the dispute and summoned the girl.

“You say the door creates possibilities?” he asked.

“No, Majesty.”

“Then what does?”

“The relation.”

The King frowned.

“The relation between what?”

She looked towards the doorway.

“Between what is here and what might become possible from here.”

The King was silent.

That evening he ordered the masons to build a second doorway.

But this one they placed between the palace and the sea.

When it was opened, the people discovered a path that had not existed before.

The sea had always been there.

The palace had always been there.

But now each had acquired a new significance in relation to the other.

The people could leave.

The sea could be entered.

The palace could be departed from.

A new possibility had appeared without a new thing appearing.

And then the oldest philosopher understood something that frightened him.

Perhaps the world was not made first of things and then of relations.

Perhaps the world was continually being shaped by relations that opened some paths and closed others.

Perhaps a relation was not merely a description of how things happened to stand.

Perhaps it was one of the ways by which the world decided what could happen next.

The philosophers gathered that night beneath the Tree.

The Stone lay beside them.

They looked at the two familiar things.

For the first time, neither seemed quite as simple as before.

The Tree was not merely beside the Stone.

It was shelter for some creatures, obstacle for others, landmark for travellers, shade for those who rested beneath it.

The Stone was not merely heavier than the Tree.

It was a seat, a boundary, a weapon, a foundation, a marker.

Nothing about the Tree had changed.

Nothing about the Stone had changed.

And yet, in the web of their relations, different worlds could begin.

The girl stood and looked towards the distant palace.

“There is something we have been asking wrongly,” she said.

“What is that?” asked the philosopher.

“We keep asking what is related to what.”

She paused.

“Perhaps we should ask what the relation allows to become possible.”

And from that day onwards, the people of the First Country changed the way they spoke.

They no longer imagined relations as threads hanging between things.

They imagined them as doors.

Some opened.

Some closed.

Some could be crossed by everyone.

Some only by a few.

Some appeared to be walls until someone discovered the hinge.

And some doors, once opened, revealed that the world on the other side had been possible all along.

The people eventually gave a name to the strange power by which relations opened worlds.

They called it Possibility.

But the oldest philosopher, who had become rather less certain of himself, preferred another name.

He called it Becoming.

For he had finally understood that the world does not merely contain possibilities.

It is continually being made into a world of possibilities by the differences its relations establish.

And so the question written above the doorway of the First Country became:

What does this relation make possible?