Location from Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
The world outside the House — our world, with its cities and universities and people, which Piranesi has almost entirely forgotten and which the Other visits twice a week before returning.
The Other World exists at the edges of Piranesi's consciousness like a dream he cannot quite reconstruct. Sometimes a word surfaces — 'bus,' 'university,' 'coffee' — and he knows what it means without knowing how he knows. Sometimes he wakes from sleep with images of rooms that are not made of marble, faces that are not made of stone, and a feeling of loss so acute it takes his breath away before it fades. He does not miss the Other World because he does not remember it clearly enough to miss. But the fragments persist, noted in his journal with the same careful attention he gives everything else: anomalous data, unexplained, filed under 'things to investigate further.' The Other comes and goes from this world freely, which means there is a way between them — a door, a passage, a method. Piranesi does not seek it. Why would he? The House is the World.
Piranesi has fragmentary impressions: streets with vehicles, buildings made of brick and glass, rooms with electric light and furniture, people — so many people, crowds of them, more than thirteen, more than he can count. The colours are wrong — too vivid, too varied, nothing like the House's serene palette of grey marble and green seawater. Trees. Rain that falls from a sky you can see. A sun.
Also known as: Our World, The Outside, The World Beyond