A Room of One’s Own

1. A Room of One’s Own • Playing on the title of a book by Virginia Woolf, Barfield uses this phrase to designate the interior, separate mental world—"the null point between original and final participation" (Saving the Appearances 210)—which we now as Camera Men accept as a given but which is, in reality the end-result of the process of interiorization working throughout history and the evolution of consciousness. • The New Testament records an awareness of our occupation of a room of one's own, as Barfield notes in Saving the Appearances: • This subjective emptiness—which was perhaps also the “wilderness” or “lonely place” in which the Baptist is described as calling for “repentance”—seems to be the psychic condition which is brought about when the elimination of participation has deprived the outer “kingdom”—the outer world of images, whether artificial or natural—of all spiritual substance, while the new kingdom within has not yet begun to be realized. (209-210) • Taking up residence in a room of one's own, we fall victim to a grave epistemological mistake: "It is a mistake that we nearly all make all the time, and we all make nearly all the

2. time—to imagine that inward and immaterial component of the totality we call 'the world' as being a sort of something located and confined inside our heads" (History, Guilt, and Habit 66).