Doorway to the imagination

Many writers and painters have likened their creativity to stepping through a door. Georgia O'Keeffe painted portraits of the doors to adobe houses in New Mexico. C.S. Lewis envisioned the passage to Narnia being as simple as stepping through the door of a common wardrobe.

Doors can shut out the dark. Doors can let in the light.

These are pictures of the door at the Wayside in Concord, Mass. Here is a door to the imagination. Notice how the green paint blends in so naturally with the lawn and woods beyond the house.

Tap on the fine brass knocker and admire the head of Pan peeking out from the poet's laurel. It's an invitation to leave the mundane world and walk in the universe of the mind.

Many writers have accepted this invitation from the Wayside: the Alcotts, father and daughter; Margaret Sidney and her Five Little Peppers; and most impressively, novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne.

He stepped through this passageway countless times during his residency from 1852 to his death in 1864. Over this threshold he imagined a purely American landscape peopled by guilt-ridden ministers, mad-eyed inventors tinkering with eternity, and great-hearted women whose inner strength and capacity for love still inspires readers today.

(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Society