"Threshold magic. At the entrance to the skating park, to the pub, to the tennis court, to resort locations: penates. The hen that lays the golden praline-eggs, the machine that stamps our names on nameplates, slot machines, fortunetelling devices, and above all weighing devices...--these guard the threshold. Oddly, such machines don't flourish in the city, but rather are components of excursion sits, of beer gardens in the suburbs....Of course, this same magic prevails more covertly in the interior of the bourgeois dwelling. Chairs beside an entrance, photographs flanking a doorway, are fallen household deities, and the violence they must appease grips our hearts even today at each ringing of the doorbell." (214)

(Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.)