One of the funny things a woman can offer a man is a curved roof. Don’t laugh. Pagodas are feminine.
As soon as a woman is living in a room, its ceiling curves. You haven’t noticed? If she’s wretched in the room, it droops like a torn sleeve. If she’s OK it rolls on and on like the hills of Galilee. To have the effect, it’s not enough for a woman to visit a room, she has to live in it. It’s a phenomenon like weather, it has to go on for months.
If it goes on for months, it’s as if cyclones and anti-cyclones cross the ceiling and make it billow, and as if Geometry has gone out to play backgammon and never came back. No more right angles. Only slopes.
A man lies down on the floor of such a room, and the ceiling, instead of being above him, comes beside him, fits his body. Lie on your bunk. I’m sending you a curved roof.
—John Berger, From A to X
