W. G. Sebald in ‘The Rings of Saturn’ gives a wonderful account of Thomas Abrams of Chestnut Tree Farm, East Anglia.
Thomas Abrams, a farmer, lived in an ancient moated house but gave up keeping his land and property to build a model of the Temple of Jerusalem in one of his unused barns. He worked on this day and night, year after year. You could ‘read’ such an obsession in many ways but my sense of what Sebald was trying to convey was not about Abrams’ religion or obsession, but rather about how we live our lives subjectively and that each living individual can only ever know their own temple.