Rooms

There are 852 rooms in the human mind. 

Some people debate this claim because after a child is born, at the moment when they first hear the sound of laughter (which is typically within the first two days of their birth), room 200 is split into room 200a and 200b. If counted separately, this would bring the total number of rooms in the human mind to 853. 

Most people agree it is not so important whether one says that there are 852 or 853 rooms. As long as they stick with either of those numbers, they can be taken seriously. 

Room 1 is the Map Room. Many think it is the mind’s most beautiful room, while others find it the most terrifying. There is no furniture in this room, other than an antique lamp hung from the ceiling. On each of the four walls, as well as the ceiling and the floor, all 852 rooms are illustrated in deep black ink on a parchment wallpaper that peels where the edges of each wall meet. 

Being in the Map Room can evoke the sensation of infinity. Usually, the feeling is most intense when one looks at the illustration of room 1, which is just next to the bottom-right corner of the door. 

Early on, many people were nervous about exploring rooms 40-66 of their own mind, because in the first published photographs of Map Rooms, these rooms appeared much darker in colour than others.

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The first published photographs of the rooms of the human mind were a series of 24 different people’s Map Rooms, each shot from the exact same angle. 

There was widespread disagreement about who ought to be the first person to have their mind photographed for public dissemination, who would retain the rights to the images, and whether such photography was ethical in the first place. 

But all three issues were addressed at once when it was discovered that unlike all other rooms (which have unique differences between people) Map Rooms are so similar to each other as to be indistinguishable. (Except for the difference between before and after the split of room 200). As such, it is impossible to identify a person from their Map Room alone, so there were no privacy issues with publishing these photos.

Nonetheless, there was an open call held for people to submit themselves for Map Room photography. 130,266 people completed the application before the form closed. One photograph would have done just fine, but 24 were selected at random to prove their identicality (the only discrepancies were subtle and random differences in the patterns of their wallpaper peeling). 

Image rights of Map Rooms are always held by the photographer, not the room’s owner. 

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Superstitions formed around rooms 40-66 after an article in Nature suggested that these rooms were darker because they were related to trauma or depression. Many people refused to enter them, and for several days there was mass hysteria following a rumour that those who entered any of these rooms could never leave.

Panic more or less evaporated when it was discovered that a splotch of accumulated dirt on the lamp in the Map Room was responsible for casting a shadow over rooms 40-66, and that this dirt could simply be wiped away by one’s sleeve with zero observable consequences.

Rooms 40-66 have now been well explored, and there seems to be nothing particularly dark about them. Room 42, for instance, is a storage room housing small cardboard cutouts which correspond to the shapes of the hands which a person shakes over their lifetime. 

Room 46 is difficult to enter because it is full of a dense array of taut red strings, like cobwebs. There are roughly 16,000 strings in total at the beginning of one’s life. A string falls whenever one clips a fingernail. Nobody in human history has cut their fingernails enough times for all of the strings to fall in their life (that would have to be roughly 16,000 clipped nails).

Room 55 is the olfactory room, which looks rather like a greenhouse. An exotic garden fills it, and the ceiling is made of frosted glass (which doubles as the floor for room 236, the “space” room which is the tallest room in the human mind and has only glass walls). 

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Room 336 houses the machine which processes apophatic language. The machine is on the floor against the far wall when you enter, and looks rather like a typewriter. Next door is room 337, which processes cataphatic language with a similar looking machine.

Room 427 is where the self is understood to be located. This room is completely empty—aside from dead leaves which occasionally blow in from the adjacent “tree” room (426). 

Room 509 is known as the “closed” room, because it has no doors. It is enterable only through a small loose panel in the ceiling. Earlier discovery of room 509 might have prevented the mass hysteria of rooms 40-66, as room 509 is now speculated to hold trauma or depression. Although being in room 509 feels mostly like being in any other room (unless you stay for longer than three minutes, in which case you begin to feel quite cold).

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Many people expected there to be a room for love. Indeed, some expected there would be several: rooms for romance, friendship, love of a pet, self-love… 

But now, every room is accounted for, and there is no room which corresponds to love. 

It is true that some people deny this, claiming that room 427 is the love room––that it is not really empty. Others, more radically, think that room 509 is the love room—but only for the first three minutes.

Many people think that love is inscribed in the walls of every room. Some have curiously peeled away at the wallpaper in their own map rooms to search for hidden etchings, but there appears to be nothing to see—and such practice is generally discouraged. 

Others still think that love cannot be found in any room, because love is formed as a bond between the human mind and other beings or things and cannot be inside any one mind. 

The phrase “there is no room for love” has become a common expression, often to convey one’s deepest feelings for loved ones, or to wonder at the great mysteries of our universe.

Dedicated to my Grandma, recovering from delirium in the hospital.