...of a lesson

The point of recounting these observations is simply to show how understandable it was for Navidson the impenetrable sweep of that place soon acquired greater meaning simply because, to quote the Criteria directly, "it was full of unheimliche vorklanger and thus represented a means to his own propitiation." The sharp-bladed tactics of The BFJ Criteria, however, are not so naive as to suddenly embrace Navidson's stated convictions about what he might find. Instead the Criteria quite adroitly acknowledges that when Tom died every "angry, rueful, self-indicting tangle" within Navidson suddenly "lit up," producing projections powerful and painful enough to "occlude, deny, and cover" the only reason for their success in the first place: the blankness of that place, "the utter and perfect blankness."

It is nevertheless the underlying position of the Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria that Navidson in fact relied on such projections in order to deny his increasingly more "powerful and motivating Thanatos." In the end, he sought nothing less than to see the house exact its annihilating effects on his own being. Again quoting directly from The Criteria: "Navidson has one deeply acquired organising perception: there is no hope of survival there. Life is impossible. And therein lies the lesson of the house, spoken in syllables of absolute silence, resounding within him like a faint and uncertain echo... If we desire to live, we can only do so in the margins of that place."

[House of Leaves, Danielewski, M. Z.]