Yonder Windows

“Here in the northwest, where we have an enormous light-swing between summer and winter (16 hours of daylight in midsummer, to something less than eight in December), we inmates have developed a kind of comic ‘cuckoo-clock’ behavior: we all pop out of our houses every time the sun shines.”—Anita Sullivan 

“The sun was shining on the sea,/Shining with all his might:/He did his very best to make/The billows smooth and bright—/And this was odd because it was/The middle of the night.” —From “The Walrus and the Carpenter” by Lewis Carroll

The Highest Cauldron

By Anita Sullivan 

Note: This week, Weekly Hubris is featuring the writing of essayist Anita Sullivan, with two essays from her rich archive here at the magazine, and this new one, on windows: portals to the light and air; ways “out,” if only virtual, for those “in.”

EUGENE Oregon—(Weekly Hubris)—1/26/2015—This is the winter of waiting for my house to sell. While I’m waiting, I can’t do very much else except pace the floor, look out the windows, make soup, change the water in the birdbath. Almost everything else requires spending money, which I don’t have until my house sells. It’s all circular reasoning.

My chief consolation during this time of enforced idleness is to imagine the windows in my new house. I should mention here that I come from a short but distinguished line of claustrophobes: “short,” meaning the line began with my mother, and her phobia was fear of crowds (being closed in and rendered immobile by other people) whereas mine is fear of being cut off from access to outdoor light.

Here in the northwest, where we have an enormous light-swing between summer and winter (16 hours of daylight in midsummer, to something less than eight in December), we inmates have developed a kind of comic “cuckoo-clock” behavior: we all pop out of our houses every time the sun shines.

Yet oddly enough, the winter light here is glorious. Despite the best effort of the pines, cedars, firs, and lichen-infested, moss-covered oaks to fill up every spare inch between earth and sky, all we have to do is look straight up and we will be confronted with a light of stunning clarity—a light that has been swished around inside the ancient cauldron of Old Forest, filtered through millions of needles, caught and held by raindrops poised on the ends of leaves, twigs and branches—and magnified. The light here in winter is a thoroughly worked over light, like sand refined into silk.

My own simple equation goes like this: I need much more light than the average person; I have chosen to make my home at a latitude that for six months out of every year deprives me of the light-nourishment I need for basic sanity; therefore, I have become totally dependent, night and day, on windows.

And what is a window? It’s a hole in a wall.

But why the wall? For comfort against bad weather; for privacy; for safety against invasion and theft.

Are windows necessary? Not really. A door can do everything a window can do.

In human history it’s not necessary to ask “Why doorways?” or “Why ovens?” or “Why garbage heaps?” But we could ask “Why windows?”

When humans gradually came around to the enormous collective decision to stop being wanderers, foragers, hunter-gatherers, living mostly outdoors like all their fellow creatures—and decided to “go inside”—they often tended to huddle in very small spaces with no windows. For millennia they cooked, ate, slept, told stories, gave birth and died in windowless dwellings. Claustrophobia, perhaps, was not yet dreamed of in their philosophy.

Even now, windows, like art, seem to be “extra.” How many houses I see on days of thin winter sunlight, whose windows remain completely covered by blinds or curtains! Why are windows not all built clear up to the roof-line? Why do we insist on having porches and carports whose roofs deplete our paltry ration of daylight? Do people never gaze for the sheer pleasure of it? Even cats will sit for hours looking from the inside out.

It seems to me that humans wouldn’t have invented windows at all until they started looking about themselves in a certain way. Maybe the window was originally brought about as a defense mechanism, offering extra protection against predators. Even so, when the firm distinction between “outside” and “inside” space became well established in daily life, there must have gradually emerged habitual ways to connect the two spaces more easily and clearly. This could inadvertently lead to all sorts of extraneous, adjunct behavior patterns: The urgent advent of daydreaming? Of art?

All I know is that I want my new house to have high ceilings and enormous windows, through which I will rejoice in a world that is not mine, one that that fuels my heart energy with a light that has been who-knows-where before it streams down onto my face.

Note: Photo of cannon emplacement from the Marin Highlands by Timothy Sullivan.