"The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts"

As homes grow brighter and more rational with the progress of technology and understanding, they paradoxically become spaces haunted by presences the light cannot dispel. Illumination, in its literal and metaphorical forms, modern lighting, transparency of architecture, psychological clarity, and the rational arrangement of domestic life, ostensibly pushes back shadows and dispels fear. Yet, it is the very act of reaching for total neglect of shadows, both physical and psychological, that reveals, or perhaps creates, a new kind of haunting.

Ghosts in this context are more than remnants of the supernatural imagination; they are vestiges of unresolved memories, suppressed desires, the sediment of past inhabitants, and histories ignored or sanitized by the new clarity. Where once darkness might have hidden anxieties, secrets, or traumas, perfect illumination can act as an amplifier rather than an eraser. Surfaces made visible only reveal the subtle traces of what lingers beneath: overlooked losses, family conflicts, generational wounds, emotional voids, or barely-perceived unease.

The metaphor extends to the cultural and psychological: as society strives to master domestic life, promising control and comfort through new technologies and social norms, there is an eerie counterpoint, an awareness that something essential is lost in the process. The shadows that once offered mystery or concealment are replaced by ghosts that ooze from the very walls, discomforts that cannot be eradicated by electrical brilliance or rational order, but persist precisely because of what has been forgotten, denied, or repressed.

Thus, enlightenment is not synonymous with peace or resolution. As the environments become more exposed and the mysteries of old banished, the homes become repositories of spectral anxieties. The presence of ghosts is thus a reflection on the nature of progress itself, how every effort to clarify and improve both acknowledges and creates its own elusive, inescapable shadows.