Post #605

At once a psychological and an aesthetic phenomenon, [unheilmlich] both established and destabilized at the same time. Its effects were guaranteed by an original authenticity, a first burial, and made all the more potent by virtue of a return that, in civilization, was in a real sense out of place. Something was not, then, merely haunted, but rather revisited by a power that was thought long dead. To such a force the romantic psyche and the romantic aesthetic sensibility were profoundly open; at any moment what seemed on the surface homely and comforting, secure and clear of superstition, might be reappropriated by something that should have remained secret but that nevertheless, through some chink in the shutters of progress, had returned. Anthony Vidler - The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (1992), p. 27