“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Neither house expresses your own particular individualistic ways of life, of course, but each one comes close enough to intrigue you, and either one could be made to suit your purposes quite easily. You were attracted also because the people who put their greatest imprint upon those houses so shared some of your tendencies. In the second house your ideas of privacy were shown to you, carried to an extreme, where the windows would not even open. In the first house the stairs to the second floor were purposely steep, and never altered, because no one was invited to view the private family bedrooms. The stairs were meant to be formidable.

I suggested that you take it (but see my note in the material at next break). It would have been good for you both, but you were afraid of it, and your feelings had much to do with the contract being turned down (by the Veteran’s Administration). That house represented what each of you thought of as unbridled, undisciplined creativity. It was dirty and cluttered. The artist had children who ran about without any control. There was much playfulness there, however, that could have tempered some of your great mutual seriousness at the time. You did not choose to accept such a probability then, any more than you could have accepted my advice all the way. The authorities turned the contract down — but the authorities stood for the inner disciplinarians, and you did not want to share your road with the world; nor did you want, later, to share your driveway (for the Sayre house) with your neighbor.

(Considering parallels, here’s another of the many “connections” that Jane and I have become aware of since we began our housing odyssey last year [already we’ve compiled a list of 30 similar relationships]: Three out of the four dwellings that in one way or another we’ve been seriously involved with possess driveways shared by next-door neighbors — Mr. Markle’s in Sayre; the apartment house we live in now; and the house in Elmira that we considered buying in 1964. Only the Foster Avenue place is exempt here. I see such connections as symbols running through our personal experiences.