Can I talk about how the idea of living buildings in pathologic? Because before I mostly joked about it being pathologic being weird but I finally realized that, like many things in pathologic; it’s a deeply philosophical idea given physical form. And another element of focus’s makes sense- because I think I’ve felt it. The feeling that a building like the polyhedron creates in people.
I’m not a religious person, as a matter of fact for a very long time I looked down upon and mocked organized religion as cult for people unable to find their own reason to live. Of course I realize now that that’s a wrong elitist way of thinking and I’m ashamed of ever holding that perspective. But it’s the perspective I had when this event happened to me. My family and I traveled to New York, and we visited st. Patrick’s cathedral. And I cannot fully describe the feeling that stepping into that building gave me. It was…majesty. I was utterly shaken beholding something so incredibly beautiful and powerful, and at the same time unwelcoming. I was not supposed to be there. I, someone who doesn’t believe in god and scoffed upon the idea should not be allowed to see this majesty of humanity, belief and engineering, I should be ashamed of thinking it was nothing more than a building. And holy shit can I tell you how TERRIFYING that feeling is? Because it’s deeply scary to think a building doesn’t want you there.
That building was fucking alive.
It was a great art and masterpiece built as a place of worship out of worship. It was deeply human but at the same time some evidence of a higher power, or at least such a powerful belief in a higher power that the ghost of it lived inside.
buildings are alive, not every building to such a powerful extent as that cathedral, but alive in the way that they carry the memory of something that happened in them, people who lived or died there. Have you ever entered a home and felt unwelcome? Or distinctly warm? That’s the human elements and life that have been put in that building. And that’s what a focus is I think-a pure memory of a person that can exist…physically. So maybe that’s why the buildings the stamatins designed are so strange-because they’re brand new buildings trying to capture years of human emotion and history all at once.
So that’s a focus I guess-or part of the explanation of what a focus is. Which makes the idea of focus’s even more terrifying to me honestly, they’re created to dazzle and behold a feeling, but they *cant grow* from that-for growth you need some human element. If a focus is a story it must be read, if it houses a person it only houses what remains of that person. That life that was put into peoples homes and places like that cathedral was peoples lives, people who come in and out and change and pray. A focus is just a captured memory, and memory can’t change unless it’s remembered, but with no human element to remember it than the person who’s in focus can’t change. They’re no longer human.
(Of course the utopian ending isn’t a good ending for daniil. It’s not beating death, to some it might even be a fate worse than death. )