LEVEL ONE.
You start at grade, twenty feet below the hilltop. Cut limestone walls terrace higher and higher on either side of you as you walk due North. It takes one hundred twenty steps into the solid rock belly of the mountain to arrive.
The path is eight feet wide, but seems too narrow as you walk forward. You are pinched in the bottom of a box-canyon. The limestone terraces are now cliffs, twenty feet tall.
You feel small.
The entry is a shadow, is a shelter, is a cliff-dwelling.
The entry is a giant arched steel and glass door. You open it and fall into the cave. The cave receives you. It welcomes you.
You first see the ceiling. It vaults from stalagmite columns eight times and it sparkles to a point. It is impossible not to be drawn inwards to the center.
It is a womb within a room within a backdrop of art. Everywhere, art hangs on the walls. Sculpture stands guard. Sculpture dances between the arches.
You will be spun around here, around and around and you will find the door to the wine-room, a vault full of wine, floor to floor and wall to wall to wall and wall.
And then you find the columns of light.
There are two. They are twins. The columns rise from the floor, dark but lift light and lighter towards the ceiling. The columns frame the stair and there's no more place to go but up.
LEVEL TWO.
You walk up the curving steps toward the light. One small window suggests you might climb out of the stone below to the light above. A brighter glow beckons, turn right.
And you enter the grand ballroom, the tall-ma-hall, the perfectly polite titanic dining mall, where kitchen and linen and china and Chinese and Mexican and Barbeque and laughter and crystal and Merlot and Cabernet and Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc collide and coalesce and conjoin. And the giant ceiling circle swims in a mural of shining stars and lost angels.
The same two columns, extended from the floor below, secure a great work of art. You stand at it and wonder.
Then the columns command you climb again.
LEVEL THREE.
More stairs take you up and up past three windows this time. You look out and you see the sunset, you see the chapel, you see the view to the West.
When you look west, you remember where you've been and why you're where you are right now.
Level Three is the Place of Learning. It is an easy place to be humble.
Because when you enter Level Three, your shoulders will be pulled back. You will stand straighter. You will look up two stories into a library loft of learning. The deep wooden coffered ceiling will hold your head high. The space soars and you soar. The space spins you around and uncorks your DNA.
You are opened. You listen. You learn.
The space is open and reaching. It is impossible for you not to be open and reaching.
On Level Three you reach for the impossible and you dream.
LEVEL FOUR.
If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then books are the souls of windows.
Thousands of books, floor to ceiling and wall to wall to wall and wall, are windows to secrets of wonder and to the wonder of secrets.
If you know the secret book to pull, the bookcase will part and a secret room of almost nothing but windows and a view to the East, to tomorrow, is revealed.
This is the secret study.
This is the study of secrets.
And again, those same twin columns, now, nothing but light, frame the last curving stair. The last curving stair dematerializes into nothing but windows, nothing but light.
LEVEL FIVE.
You land on the roof, on the rapture of all the winding stairs, on the deck of a crafted air-carrier, on top of a new world just discovered, above the din of dimwitted dwarves of dwindling doings and you get it. You get it!
The bronze kid taking flight on the back of a bronze paper airplane gets it and you get that he gets it.
You are him.
P.S. What is the point of Good Architecture? It is to move you, in and out, up and down, into and through. It is to move you emotionally and spiritually. If architecture fails to move you, it sucks.
P.S.P.S. No animals were harmed nor drugs taken in the writing of this Monday With Marley. No names were innocent to protect the changed.
