You Were Never Meant to Stay: The Psychology of the Hallway
Walk down a long corridor and something shifts before your thoughts catch up. The walls draw close, your peripheral vision narrows, and every environmental cue delivers the same directive: keep moving. You are not here. You have not arrived. You occupy, for a measured stretch of seconds, pure between. This experience has a formal name in anthropology. Victor Turner, studying rites of passage in 1969, described it as liminality: the state of threshold-crossing in which a person has left one defined position and not yet entered another. Turner borrowed the word from the Latin "limen," meaning threshold or doorway. He was writing about initiation rituals in Central African societies, but his framework maps precisely onto the domestic corridor. In a long hallway, you become liminal. You are mid-process. You are, in a strict phenomenological sense, nowhere. Gaston Bachelard saw this coming. In "The Poetics of Space" (1958), Bachelard argued that every zone of a dwelling ...
