The Cult of House Worship

These are not the best of times....
by Hal Crowther

Humanity’s lust for extravagant lodging predates the pharaohs and the Tower of Babel—massive stonework from prehistoric times testifies to the vanity of princes and warlords whose names have vanished from all memory. Even here in the South, residential hubris had left moldering monuments unidentifiable by 1830, when William Faulkner’s dreamtime tales of Yoknapatawpha County begin to unfold. But we look to Faulkner for our archetypes, and he rarely disappoints us. Long before there was Southern Living, there was Thomas Sutpen of Absalom, Absalom!with his French architect and his “wagon load of wild niggers” from the Caribbean, obsessively transforming a tract of virgin swamp into the grandest plantation North Mississippi had ever seen. Faulkner writes of “Sutpen’s fierce and overweening vanity or desire for magnificence or for vindication or whatever it was” driving his “dream of grim and castlelike magnificence” that a gifted architect had tamed into tasteful grandeur. the rest image