Bearing is the form a person gives to what they do not know. – Adele Vorrath, inaugural lecture, 1948
The teaching of the House can be said in one sentence, and the Director says it to every aspirant on her first day: bearing is not an opinion but a body that knows where it is. Whoever is in the room is wholly in the room; whoever is silent is visibly silent; whoever serves serves so that those served recognise it as a form and not as weakness. Behind this stands a small philosophy that nobody in the House calls one. It has three sentences. The first: attention is the rarest form of generosity; whoever truly looks at a room gives it something. The second: she who serves sees more than she who is served, because she must know both sides and the other knows only one. Ruth Adlershof, the Registrar of the archive, once wrote this sentence in the margin of a file and never withdrew it. The third: the truth can be asked of a person, but only in main clauses. A fourth sentence the House does not teach. It stands in the founder's diary, which lies sealed in the archive, and Ruth is the only ...
From the lore of Das Haus am Kanal.