ahava haus
to love, to give
Four letters: alef, heh, bet, heh. The root is ahav, which means to love and means to give.
a roof over the heart
At the center sits 心, the heart, and directly above it 冖, a roof. Above that a hand reaching down, below a slow foot arriving.
meaning, connection, coherence
A house in civic San Francisco where ten people at a time build meaning, connection, and coherence.
Reading the table…
ten seats,
one table
TENET sits at the center and means holds. It reads the same in both directions and appears twice, crossing itself, so a word about holding runs down both axes of the square. Someone cut it into a wall at Pompeii, and people carried it as a charm for centuries after. At this table the holding passes around. Every seat gets the key.
Come hold one for a night.
some things only exist when ten are present
Ten is where separate people start acting as one body. A minyan is a quorum of ten. A person can pray alone any time, and certain prayers only happen when ten are in the room, so Judaism is explicit that some things are closed to you privately. A conversation works the same way.
place is the solution
We kept having the same conversation in different rooms. Founders, funders, researchers, artists, civic people, circling one question with nowhere to keep circling it. What we were missing was a room. A regular one, with a door that closes and a host who cooks.
at ten the count
returns to one
The Pythagoreans drew ten as a triangle: one, then two, then three, then four. They called it the tetractys and swore oaths on it, because at ten the count completes and begins again at one. A dinner behaves the same way. Under ten it stays a hangout. Over ten, the table splits and the host begins performing. Ten is the ceiling on one conversation everyone can hear.
Ten seats force us to choose, and choosing is most of the work.
Trust and connection
What makes a room safe enough that people say the true thing?
Hover or tap a question
five hours,
one question
We give the evening a shape and almost no schedule. The part people write to us about afterward is the inheritance, when the book you brought leaves with somebody else.
range over
seniority
We invite people building institutions, moving capital, running research, making art, and holding pieces of civic San Francisco together. We look for range over seniority, and we want somebody at the table who will disagree with everyone else.