Properly constructed walls

Properly constructed walls

When one sees a wall one can never tell what's behind the outer layers. The paint and plaster may be immaculate but underneath the bricks can be rotten, thrown together haphazardly or full of holes. Reversely, the paint may be flaking off, the plaster cracking but otherwise the wall can be sound, just in need of some light maintenance. It's often difficult to know.

I guess it all melts down to what one wants to do with the wall. It's condition may be acceptable depending on one's requirements and purposes. A flaking wall indoors makes little sense but in a garden it may be acceptable as a picturesque element, something weathered and full of reminiscences. Even a crumbling wall might do in a garden but one wouldn't have it indoors. It would n't just be unity and dirty, there's little if anything one can do with a crumbling wall: one can't use it to support a floor or a roof, or to separate spaces; it might be useless even for hanging up shelves or pictures.

It's always like that: it's not the wall but what one wants to do with it in the particular location and situation. It might be because we call too many things "a wall". If we used more specific terms, we might be able to express more precisely what we want. It can also be that a wall doesn't have a purposeful existence without a space to bound and support: what we want may be part of the space and it just gets projected on the poor wall.