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The one border we cross so often and with such well-rehearsed reflexes that we barely notice it is the threshold of our own home.

We open the front door, we close the front door. It's the most basic geographical habit.

And yet one lifetime is not enough to recount all our comings and goings across this boundary.

What threshold rights did you perform before you left home?

Did you appease any household deities or leave a lamp burning in your tabernacle?

Did you do the quick pat-down of pockets or bag to check you had the necessary equipment for the journey?

Or take a final check in the hall mirror to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet?

You don't have a slave to guard your door as the ancients did, so you set the alarm, or you set the dog.

Keys? Yes, they're in your hand. You have the power of the keys, the right of possession that connects you to thousands of years of legal history, to the rights of sovereigns and states, to the gates of salvation and damnation.

You open the door, step through, and turn to close it.

Through its diminishing arc, the details of your life inside recede.

On one side, me and my place, writes the novelist Georges Perrake.

The private, the domestic, a space overfilled with my place, writes the novelist Georges Perrek. The private, the domestic, a space overfilled

with my possessions, my bed, my carpet, my table, my typewriter, my books. On the other side,

other people, the world, the public, politics. You can't simply let yourself slide from one into the other, can't pass from one

to the other, neither in one direction nor in the other. You have to have the password, have to cross

threshold, have to show your credentials, have to communicate with the world outside.

You lock the door, you've crossed the border, you've ignored the Latin proverb,

and Pascal's warning that all humanity's misery derives from not being able to sit alone in a quiet

room. When the Savoyard aristocrat Xavier de Meistre was sentenced to six weeks' house arrest

for dueling in 1790. He turned his

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