Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque

Host: The morning light bled through the large windows of an old library, spilling across wooden floors scarred by years of footsteps and thought. The air was thick with the scent of old paper, ink, and quiet discipline. Between rows of heavy shelves, Jack sat with a notebook open before him — pages half-filled with lines and crossed-out words. His fingers tapped the table’s edge, a quiet metronome of impatience.

Host: Across from him, Jeeny stood, her hand resting on the spine of a thick, gilded book — something ornate, heavy, the kind that belonged more in a museum than a mind. The sunlight caught the dust in the air, turning it to soft gold, like words floating between worlds.

Host: Hemingway’s voice, sharp and declarative, seemed to echo from the past, landing between them like a quiet challenge:
“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”

Jeeny: “You’d love that line, wouldn’t you, Jack? Simple, stripped-down, efficient — like a gunshot.”

Jack: “I do. It’s clean. It’s honest. Hemingway understood that words are beams, not ornaments. You build with them; you don’t decorate with them.”

Jeeny: “But that’s just engineering, not art. You make writing sound like a blueprint, not a breath.”

Jack: “And maybe that’s what it should be. Look around — this library’s filled with books that talk too much, that say everything and mean nothing. The Baroque was beautiful, but it’s dead. Overbuilt. Overwritten. Like a cathedral collapsing under its own ornament.”

Host: Jack’s voice was low, deliberate, his words like hammer strikes against the silence. He leaned back, gray eyes catching the sunlight as if it were judgment itself.

Jeeny: “You sound like you want to strip the world of its color, Jack. The Baroque wasn’t about decoration — it was about feeling, about excess as expression. What you call ornament, I call heart.”

Jack: “And what you call heart, I call clutter.”

Jeeny: “You ever stood inside a Baroque church? All that gold, light, paint, music — it wasn’t just about aesthetics, it was a spiritual architecture. People didn’t just see beauty; they felt it press against their souls.”

Jack: “And then they went home hungry and ignorant, dazzled by decoration while the priests counted their coins. That’s the problem with ornament — it’s deceptive. It makes you believe in what isn’t there.”

Host: Jeeny closed the book she’d been holding, the sound echoing through the stillness like a door slamming somewhere deep in time. The sunlight had shifted, casting sharp lines between light and shadow across their faces — a silent division of philosophy made visible.

Jeeny: “You talk about truth like it’s a measurement. But not everything that’s true can be weighed. Some truths are felt, not calculated.”

Jack: “Truth doesn’t need to be felt, it needs to be understood. If your sentence can’t stand without its adjectives, it shouldn’t stand at all.”

Jeeny: “That’s the tragedy of your kind of thinking, Jack. You want to build something so solid, so perfect, that it forgets to breathe. Even architecture needs light — space — imperfection.”

Jack: “And yet every structure collapses if you don’t respect the weight. Writing is no different. Hemingway wasn’t saying words should be soulless — he was saying they should be earned.”

Jeeny: “But he also feared what he couldn’t control — emotion, ornament, chaos. His architecture was made to withstand heartbreak, not express it.”

Host: A faint wind moved through the open window, stirring the edges of Jack’s notebook. One page flipped, revealing a single line, scribbled and half-erased:
“Maybe beauty needs walls to echo against.”

Jeeny’s eyes caught it, and for a moment, her expression softened.

Jeeny: “You see? Even you can’t resist a little Baroque.”

Jack: “That’s not Baroque. That’s structure. It’s about resonance, not ribbons.”

Jeeny: “Oh, stop it. You’re romantic, Jack, you just hide it under cement. Hemingway did the same thing — he built walls around his tenderness and called it discipline.”

Jack: “Maybe because tenderness without form turns into chaos. Look at modernism — we had to tear down centuries of decoration just to breathe again. He gave us architecture because the world was collapsing under the weight of its own poetry.”

Jeeny: “And yet here we are, talking, feeling, yearning — not because of his walls, but because of the windows others built after him. Think of Gabriel García Márquez, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison — they didn’t just construct, they painted with language. Their words didn’t build, they sang.”

Jack: “And half the time they drowned in their own music.”

Jeeny: “Maybe drowning is the only way to find depth.”

Host: The light had shifted again — now softer, warmer, more forgiving. The clock on the wall ticked, its rhythm a steady metronome against the growing tension between them.

Jack: “You want art to be emotional — to spill over the edges. I want it to be precise, to endure. That’s the difference.”

Jeeny: “But both are necessary, Jack. Architecture without decoration is just a shelter; decoration without architecture is just noise. Maybe Hemingway was right — the Baroque is over — but only because we’re still building what comes after.”

Jack: “And what do you think that is?”

Jeeny: “Balance. A place where structure and soul can coexist. Where a sentence can be both strong and beautiful.”

Jack: “So — modernism with a heartbeat?”

Jeeny: “Or Baroque with a blueprint.”

Host: Their eyes met — hers full of fire, his full of quiet calculation. The library had grown almost dark, save for the last threads of light that ran across the table between them like a shared understanding.

Jeeny: “You know what I think Hemingway really meant?”

Jack: “Enlighten me.”

Jeeny: “He wasn’t condemning beauty. He was mourning it. He saw the Baroque die — the ornament, the grandeur, the innocence — and he built his architecture to survive its ghost.”

Jack: “So his simplicity was a kind of grief.”

Jeeny: “Exactly. He was writing the ruins — not avoiding them.”

Host: Jack leaned back, his gaze distant, hands still, mind quietly turning. For once, there was no argument, only reflection. Outside, the sun had finally set, and the shadows from the shelves had merged, leaving the two of them as silhouettes in the half-light.

Jack: “You know, Jeeny… maybe architecture and decoration aren’t enemies. Maybe they’re just different ways of saying the same thing — that we’re trying to hold something before it fades.”

Jeeny: “Yes. We build to remember, and we decorate to feel.”

Host: A long silence followed — soft, full, sacred. Then Jeeny reached for the book again, opening it to a page that glimmered faintly in the fading light. She smiled — not at the words, but at the space between them.

Host: The library was quiet now. The day had ended, but something lingered — a sense that art, like life, is neither purely architecture nor purely decoration, but the eternal conversation between the two.

Host: And as the light finally dimmed, their voices — one of reason, one of feeling — blended into the same silence, like the final stroke on a wall where beauty and structure finally met and agreed to share the same space.