underneathness

While seeing at last beneath the surface of things, he sees that underneathness is not so much a system as a unity. He does glimpse the system: what he sees is the trace of a process, and that process is a system at work.

A house’s underneathness is crushing—weight of sleep pressing from the flats above, little lumps of coal releasing miniature avalanches which rattle down the black pile, furnace grimly dead, asbestos-covered arms prying into every corner.