it is so meaningful to me that the Beloved Child of the House chooses to go back to our world, and has to be reborn anew as a wholeness of who he was (Matthew, brought up in this world of Cartesianism detached and lonely but surrounded by others) and of who he became (the Beloved Child, Piranesi, in communion with the House, representing the ideal of humanity in harmony, but alone). Raphael points out towards the end: so long as there are people in its halls then there will be Ugliness (murder, imprisonment, etc) alongside its Beauty, and likewise in the very last moments of the book the man who is no longer only M.R.S nor Piranesi seems to see the House's beauty inside the people who surround him (recognizing in them the statues; the way the prose, for the very last breaths of the book, turns into a careful description of the world, mirroring Piranesi's descriptions of the House). They not only mirror one another, but flow from and into one another. One could literally not exist without the other.
And it is the same with his change. He is one and the same, but he is also separate. He will never go back to who he was, but he cannot become who he is without being who he was. The man who is not M.R.S nor Piranesi— the Beloved Child— will always long for the House, because he is Piranesi and he is human and so he belongs there; and if he returned to the House he would long for our world, because he is M.R.S and he is human and so he belongs here. So he must see one in another, and in that find his home.
And it is bittersweet, because this means loss is inevitable, and so is longing. Means one must walk across worlds, and make the walking home. To be complete one must be many separate parts. but that is being human.
His time in the Halls allowed him to experience the bliss of pure existence, to understand the world, to access the beautiful, distilled essence of everything; he accessed the realm of Ideas, and understood them deeply, in complete unobstructed connection with them. And now that he must remember, now that he must be here, that he must bear the grime and smoke of the inharmonious world, contend with what was done to him, contend with what was lost and its consequences-- he has not forgotten the House. It is a knowledge he brings with him: what it is to be the Beloved Child of the world, what it is when the world is whole and he fits perfectly inside it. So he reaches, in the very last moment, what to me reads like synthesis. to get lost in the realm of Ideas is not our task, as getting lost in the rejection of it is not our task. People cannot get back the world where men turned into birds (and it perhaps never even existed, being only a misinterpretation born of the modern academic's myopic gaze; as Piranesi says, the world speaks to him all the time). he cannot get back the version of himself rid of the trauma and grief of what happened to him. Yet: the House is still always within and around him. He may not be able to be just Piranesi anymore, but once the grief of is soothed, he sees that he never left it behind. He is still its Child, and he remains Beloved.
the House is born from the world and the world is born from the House in an infinite loop, one and the same: it is our task to be part of it. To bear witness. To be in communion and conversation with it. It is our task to live. it is our home.
