A culture of centers

Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: [In Irish houses of the old style] it is bad manners to knock and for the host to keep you waiting at the door. You go into the house to the fire, the fire the centre of the hearth, the hearth the centre of the kitchen, the kitchen of the house, the house of the farm (‘the home place’), and so onwards goes what Glassie calls a culture of centres, one around which cyclical time revolves. Only illness brings you into the bedrooms in daylight, and being confined to ‘the room’ for any reason is ‘like walking the road on your lone’. ‘It put me in that much despair, I could go up into the room,’ one woman says to Glassie. One should stay by the fire, ‘in company’.