who are you, little i

who are you, little i

(five or six years old)
peering from some high

window; at the gold


of november sunset

(and feeling: that if day
has to become night

this is a beautiful way)



e.e. cummings

.
.

a man sits and watches the world

From the window a man watches the world. That's how it always begins. Through this interminable waiting. A man sitting, and watching. For years, maybe centuries. Before even the window and the unmoving body. He is like a pure regard that is embodied each time in the singularity of every new gaze. But, at the same time, what he sees does not reach him. It is as if the dawns and dusks, the seasons slow or fast, nature, things and people glide across the glass, abandoning him to his motionless solitude. Then, leaving the fascinating spectacle, his eye returns to the page where his hands occasionally trace a few more uncertain lines. At that moment he seems to perceive a sudden accord: the one between his fragile human span and the absolute instant of the world. Upon raising his eyes anew, rediscovering the lost vision, the feeling of an irreparable distance — of a tiny wound. A feeling of being there and of not being there. Could that be beauty? he asks himself. And writing, this desire to repair, each time, the imperceptible tear? To regather into a loose weave of words these scattered figures of fate and make of them a single tangible moment. Such that covered, erased by the flow of words, the world would end up being reborn, emerging from this very movement that first annulled it and that, now, offers it this vivacity of which it had just appeared to be deprived. Yes, writing would first be that: sitting to see the world rise within the light of language. And, in an almost mute voice — a breath caused by the words and which bears them — never ceasing to celebrate this beauty, repeating like a silent prayer this simple phrase of Beckett's: "I watch time pass and it is so beautiful."

De la fenêtre un homme regarde le monde. C’est toujours comme ça que cela commence. Par cette attente interminable. Un homme assis, et qui regarde. Depuis des années, des siècles peut-être. Avant même la fenêtre et le corps immobile. Il est comme un pur regarder qui chaque fois s’incarnerait dans la singularité de chaque nouveau regard. Mais, en même temps, ce qu’il voit ne l’atteint pas. C’est comme si les aubes et les crépuscules, les saisons lentes ou rapides, la nature les choses et les hommes glissaient sur la vitre, l’abandonnaient à son immobile solitude. Alors, quittant le fascinant spectacle, ses yeux reviennent à la page où ses mains tracent de temps à autre quelques lignes incertaines. A ce moment il lui semble percevoir comme un accord soudain: celui de sa fragile durée humaine et de l’instant absolu du monde. Avec, dès que ses yeux se lèvent à nouveau, retrouvant la vision perdue, le sentiment d’un irrémédiable écart — d’une infime blessure. Un sentiment d’y être et de n’y être pas. Serait-ce cela la beauté? se demande-t-il. Et écrire, ce désir à chaque fois de réparer l’imperceptible accroc? De recueillir dans un léger tissage des paroles ces figures éparses du devenir et les rendre un instant solidaires. De telle sorte que recouvert, effacé par l’afflux de mots, le monde finirait par venir y renaître, surgissant de ce mouvement même qui d’abord l’a annulé et qui, maintenant, lui offre cette vivacité dont jusque là il paraissait privé. Oui, écrire ce serait d’abord cela: s’asseoir pour voir se lever le monde dans le jour du langage. Et, d’une voix presque muette — d’un souffle engendré par les mots et qui les porte —, ne cesser de célébrer cette beauté, répétant comme une prière muette cette phrase si simple de Beckett : “Je regarde passer le temps et c’est si beau.” 
(lire)

Jacques Ancet

(English translation by Michael Tweed)

.

.

at a window

Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.

Carl Sandburg, 1914

.

.

.

a girl and her duenna (aka two women at a window)

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

info

.

.

the distant window witness

The gentlemen sat K. down on the ground, leant him against the stone and settled his head down on the top of it. Despite all the effort they went to, and despite all the co-operation shown by K., his demeanour seemed very forced and hard to believe. So one of the gentlemen asked the other to grant him a short time while he put K. in position by himself, but even that did nothing to make it better. In the end they left K. in a position that was far from the best of the ones they had tried so far. Then one of the gentlemen opened his frock coat and from a sheath hanging on a belt stretched across his waistcoat he withdrew a long, thin, double-edged butcher's knife which he held up in the light to test its sharpness. The repulsive courtesies began once again, one of them passed the knife over K. to the other, who then passed it back over K. to the first. K. now knew it would be his duty to take the knife as it passed from hand to hand above him and thrust it into himself. But he did not do it, instead he twisted his neck, which was still free, and looked around. He was not able to show his full worth, was not able to take all the work from the official bodies, he lacked the rest of the strength he needed and this final shortcoming was the fault of whoever had denied it to him. As he looked round, he saw the top floor of the building next to the quarry. He saw how a light flickered on and the two halves of a window opened out, somebody, made weak and thin by the height and the distance, leant suddenly far out from it and stretched his arms out even further. Who was that? A friend? A good person? Somebody who was taking part? Somebody who wanted to help? Was he alone? Was it everyone? Would anyone help? Were there objections that had been forgotten? There must have been some. The logic cannot be refuted, but someone who wants to live will not resist it. Where was the judge he'd never seen? Where was the high court he had never reached? He raised both hands and spread out all his fingers.

But the hands of one of the gentleman were laid on K.'s throat, while the other pushed the knife deep into his heart and twisted it there, twice. As his eyesight failed, K. saw the two gentlemen cheek by cheek, close in front of his face, watching the result. "Like a dog!" he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.

Kafka, The Trial

.

the afternoon

Bodu Yang
acrylic on canvas, 11"x11"

.
.

interior, venice, 1914

Charles Hodge Mackie
info

childhood window

Child with Basket, Walter Rosenblum, East Harlem 1952

.
.

philosopher in meditation

Rembrandt
top: St. Jerome in a Dark Chamber, etching on paper
bottom: Philosopher in Meditation, oil on panel

.
.

a window covered with raindrops

Saul Leiter

Unplanned and unstaged, Mr. Leiter’s photographs are slices fleetingly glimpsed by a walker in the city. People are often in soft focus, shown only in part or absent altogether, though their presence is keenly implied. Sensitive to the city’s found geometry, he shot by design around the edges of things: vistas are often seen through rain, snow or misted windows.

“A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person,” Mr. Leiter says in “In No Great Hurry.”

from 

here



.

man in window, new york city, 1978

Lucinda Bunnen


.
.

intrusiveness

"You can call him if you want to," said the supervisor, stretching his hand out towards the outer room where the telephone was, "please, go on, do make your phone call." "No, I don't want to any more," said K., and went over to the window. Across the street, the people were still there at the window, and it was only now that K. had gone up to his window that they seemed to become uneasy about quietly watching what was going on. The old couple wanted to get up but the man behind them calmed them down. "We've got some kind of audience over there," called K. to the supervisor, quite loudly, as he pointed out with his forefinger. "Go away," he then called across to them. And the three of them did immediately retreat a few steps, the old pair even found themselves behind the man who then concealed them with the breadth of his body and seemed, going by the movements of his mouth, to be saying something incomprehensible into the distance. They did not disappear entirely, though, but seemed to be waiting for the moment when they could come back to the window without being noticed. "Intrusive, thoughtless people!" said K. as he turned back into the room. The supervisor may have agreed with him, at least K. thought that was what he saw from the corner of his eye. But it was just as possible that he had not even been listening as he had his hand pressed firmly down on the table and seemed to be comparing the length of his fingers. The two policemen were sitting on a chest covered with a coloured blanket, rubbing their knees. The three young people had put their hands on their hips and were looking round aimlessly. Everything was still, like in some office that has been forgotten about.

Franz Kafka, from The Trial

.

to flash upon the window and be gone

Thus did he see first, he the hill-bound, the sky-girt, of whom the mountains were his masters, the fabulous South. The picture of flashing field, of wood, and hill, stayed in his heart forever: lost in the dark land, he lay the night-long through within his berth, watching the shadowy and phantom South flash by, sleeping at length, and waking suddenly, to see cool lakes in Florida at dawn, standing quietly as if they had waited from eternity for this meeting; or hearing, as the train in the dark hours of morning slid into Savannah, the strange quiet voices of the men upon the platform, the boding faint echoes of the station, or seeing, in pale dawn, the phantom woods, a rutted lane, a cow, a boy, a drab, dull-eyed against a cottage door, glimpsed, at this moment of rushing time, for which all life had been a plot, to flash upon the window and be gone.

His life coiled back into the brown murk of the past like a twined filament of electric wire; he gave life, a pattern, and movement to these million sensations that Chance, the loss or gain of a moment, the turn of the head, the enormous and aimless impulsion of accident, had thrust into the blazing heat of him.

...

And it was this that awed him--the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time. There was one moment of timeless suspension when the land did not move, the train did not move, the slattern in the doorway did not move, he did not move.

It was as if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute. Or like those motion- pictures that describe the movements of a swimmer making a dive, or a horse taking a hedge--movement is petrified suddenly in mid-air, the inexorable completion of an act is arrested. Then, completing its parabola, the suspended body plops down into the pool. Only, these images that burnt in him existed without beginning or ending, without the essential structure of time. Fixed in no-time, the slattern vanished, fixed, without a moment of transition. His sense of unreality came from time and movement, from imagining the woman, when the train had passed, as walking back into the house, lifting a kettle from the hearth embers. Thus life turned shadow, the living lights went ghost again. The boy among the calves. Where later? Where now?

 
Thomas Wolfe, from: Look Homeward, Angel 

Window and stairway of the old Ursuline Convent, New Orleans

Arnold Genthe

.
.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot
image: Julian Peters (more)

.

.

the human condition & the problem of the window

"The problem of the window gave rise to La Condition Humane. In front of a window as seen from the interior of the room, I placed a painting (canvas and easel) that represented precisely the portion of landscape concealed by the painting. For instance the tree represented in the painting displaced the tree behind the painting outside the room. For the viewer the tree is simultaneously inside the room in the painting and outside the room in the real landscape."

"This is how we see the world, we see it outside ourselves; and yet the only representation of it is within us. Similarily we sometimes remember a past event and the memory makes it a present event. Time and space lose that crude meaning which is the only one we have in our daily experience."

[Magritte, Translated from a 1938 lecture, La Ligne de vie]

.

.

la belle de nuit

Rene Magritte

.
.

face behind a window

Odilon Redon
charcoal on paper

.
.

the balcony room

Vilhelm Hammershoi, 1911

.
.

at the window

At the Window
William Rothenstein (British, 1872–1945) 

Oil on canvas, 56.2 x 44.9 cm.

Manchester City Galleries

.

.

.

grace (or not)

.

Tenth Street at Night, 1960

John Cohen

.
.

at the white window

Whatever one sees beyond it –
green lawn, gray sky, blue heaving sea –

it’s clear that the window’s framing of the view
is half the meaning, maybe more.

The room is bare, the floorboards simple,
the sunlight falls in angles on the floor.

By being here alone, our sight
entering this picture, thoughtfully,

we celebrate both solitude and its mysterious
opposite, the sense of never being quite alone,

of having dim companions – from the past,
the future, from unsensed dimensions –

as we move slowly to the window,
never to raise the sash, or even touch the pane,

but simply to look out, acknowledging
our unabashed humanity, both frame and view.

David Young

.

.

towards the archetype

windows of the Brukenthal Museum in Sibiu, Romania, 

photographs by Cristina

 

.

blue window

That longing you have to be invisible,
transparent as glass, thin air
that is what moves you certain times to tears
watching the evening fill with city lights
and the long dusty summer avenues
rise weightless through the air and
tremble like constellations in a sky so
deep and clear you are your one desire,
Oh, let me be that blue…



And in another moment you would stream out the window and into the sky like
a breath —
but it is almost too dark to see. In the next apartment
a door is flung open. Someone speaks someone's name.



from: Katha Pollitt, Blue Window

 

 

 

.

la toilette bleue

Georges Braque, 1942
148 by 95 cm (57 1/2 by 37 1/2 in.)

.
.

georgia at the window

Georgia O'Keeffe: a portrait, 1918
palladium print, Alfred Stieglitz

.
.

onto the window, the rain

 Outside the Dune.

 Alone the house, monotonous,
 onto the window,
 the rain.

 Behind me,
 click, clack,
 a clock,
 my forehead
 against the window.

 Nothing.

 Everything passed.

 Gray the sky,
 gray the sea,
 and gray
 the heart.


Arno Holz, Drearily trickling drizzle 
tr. Walter A. Aue

Draußen die Düne.

Einsam das Haus, eintönig,

ans Fenster,

der Regen.

Hinter mir,

ticktack,

eine Uhr,

meine Stirn

gegen die Scheibe.

Nichts.

Alles vorbei.

Grau der Himmel,

grau die See

und grau

das Herz.

Trostlos rieselndes Tropfen 

.

through a storm-lashed windowpane

Or, holding in fief the storm and the dark and all the black powers of wizardry, to gaze, ghoul-visaged, through a storm-lashed windowpane, briefly planting unutterable horror in grouped and sheltered life; or, no more than a man, but holding, in your more than mortal heart, demoniac ecstasy, to crouch against a lonely storm-swept house, to gaze obliquely through the streaming glass upon a woman, or your enemy, and while still exulting in your victorious dark all-seeing isolation, to feel a touch upon your shoulder, and to look, haunter-haunted, pursuer-pursued, into the green corrupted hell-face of malignant death.

Thomas Wolfe, from Look Homeward, Angel

.

books and windows

In those days there was no money to buy books. I borrowed books from the rental library of Shakespeare and Company, which was the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l’Odéon. On a cold windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive. Sylvia had a lively, sharply sculptured face, brown eyes that were as alive as a small animal’s and as gay as a young girl’s, and wavy brown hair that was brushed back from her fine forehead and cut thick below her ears and at the line of the collar of the brown velvet jacket she wore. She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.

I was very shy when I first went into the bookshop and I did not have enough money on me to join the rental library. She told me I could pay the deposit any time I had the money and made me out a card and said I could take as many books as I wished.

There was no reason for her to trust me. She did not know me and the address I had given her, 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine, could not have been a poorer one. But she was delightful and charming and welcoming and behind her, as high as the wall and stretching into the back room which gave onto the inner court of the building, were shelves and shelves of the wealth of the library.

(i give a lenghtier quote below just for the beauty of it)

In those days there was no money to buy books. I borrowed books from the rental library of Shakespeare and Company, which was the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l’Odéon. On a cold windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive. Sylvia had a lively, sharply sculptured face, brown eyes that were as alive as a small animal’s and as gay as a young girl’s, and wavy brown hair that was brushed back from her fine forehead and cut thick below her ears and at the line of the collar of the brown velvet jacket she wore. She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.

I was very shy when I first went into the bookshop and I did not have enough money on me to join the rental library. She told me I could pay the deposit any time I had the money and made me out a card and said I could take as many books as I wished.

There was no reason for her to trust me. She did not know me and the address I had given her, 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine, could not have been a poorer one. But she was delightful and charming and welcoming and behind her, as high as the wall and stretching into the back room which gave onto the inner court of the building, were shelves and shelves of the wealth of the library.

I started with Turgenev and took the two volumes of A Sportsman’s Sketches and an early book of D.H. Lawrence, I think it was Sons and Lovers, and Sylvia told me to take more books if I wanted. I chose the Constance Garnett edition of War and Peace , and The Gambler and Other Stories by Dostoyevsky.

“You won’t be back very soon if you read all that,” Sylvia said.

“I’ll be back to pay,” I said. “I have some money in the flat.”

“I didn’t mean that,” she said. “You pay whenever it’s convenient.”

“When does Joyce come in?” I asked.

“If he comes in, it’s usually very late in the afternoon,” she said. “Haven’t you ever seen him?”

“We’ve seen him at Michaud’s eating with his family,” I said. “But it’s not polite to look at people when they are eating, and Michaud’s is expensive.”

“Do you eat at home?”

“Mostly now,” I said. “We have a good cook.”

“There aren’t any restaurants in your immediate quarter, are there?”

“No. How did you know?”

“Larbaud lived there,” she said. “He liked it very much except for that.”

“The nearest good cheap place to eat is over by the Panthéon.” 

“I don’t know that quarter. We eat at home. You and your wife must come sometime.”

“Wait until you see if I pay you,” I said. “But thank you very much.”

“Don’t read too fast,” she said.

Home in the rue Cardinal Lemoine was a two-room flat that had no hot water and no inside toilet facilities except an antiseptic container, not uncomfortable to anyone who was used to a Michigan outhouse. With a fine view and a good mattress and springs for a comfortable bed on the floor, and pictures we liked on the walls, it was a cheerful, gay flat. When I got there with the books I told my wife about the wonderful place I had found.

“But Tatie, you must go by this afternoon and pay,” she said.

“Sure I will,” I said. “We’ll both go. And then we’ll walk down by the river and along the quais.”

“Let’s walk down the rue de Seine and look in all the galleries and in the windows of the shops.”

“Sure. We can walk anywhere and we can stop at some new café where we don’t know anyone and nobody knows us and have a drink.”

“We can have two drinks.”

“Then we can eat somewhere.”

“No. Don’t forget we have to pay the library.”

“We’ll come home and eat here and we’ll have a lovely meal and drink Beaune from the co-operative you can see right out of the window there with the price of the Beaune on the window. And afterwards we’ll read and then go to bed and make love.”

“And we’ll never love anyone else but each other.”

“No. Never.”

“What a lovely afternoon and evening. Now we’d better have lunch.”

“I’m very hungry,” I said. “I worked at the café on a café crème.”

“How did it go, Tatie?”

“I think all right. I hope so. What do we have for lunch?”

“Little radishes, and good foie de veau with mashed potatoes and an endive salad. Apple tart.”

“And we’re going to have all the books in the world to read and when we go on trips we can take them.”

“Would that be honest?”

“Sure.”

“Does she have Henry James too?”

“Sure.”

“My,” she said. “We’re lucky that you found the place.”

“We’re always lucky,” I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.





from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway



.

the library window

window of the Oriani library, Ravenna, Italy


.

tea house window

.
.

blue window again

Blue Window of Lippovan House, Danube Delta

Ready yourself, soul,

it’s late, oh, it’s late!

The rainbow of bells,

the rainbow of bells

drinks our blood’s last pulse,

all our peace from the River.

A rainbow of bells: the evening

presses white soles to the window,

the water flows clouded,

the water flows clouded,

from I am to I shall have been.

from Realm, by Nichita Danilov, 

tr. Adam J. Sorkin and Cristina Cîrstea

about Danilov:

The poet "belongs to the Lippovan Slavic minority, a group which settled in Moldavia and the Danube delta in the eighteenth century, having fled Russian persecution after the Orthodox Church schism. Although Danilov was raised speaking both Russian and Romanian, he writes solely in the latter language.

The Lippovan identity as religious dissenters has been instrumental in constructing Danilov’s own identity. His mystical vision of religious experience seems to inform all his poems, even those that do not contain explicitly religious imagery. The imagery itself can be located in the Romanian engagement with Surrealism, which has provided Danilov a mode for describing an ineffable God. In his poetry and theoretical writings, he argues that the divine is manifest in this world through surrealistic moments, that is, through jarring juxtapositions."

by Sean Cotter, who translated a volume of Danilov's poetry into english.

.

blue is not always serene

The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,

rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head

propped on 'The Meaning of Meaning'.

He catwalks down our corridor.

Azure day

makes my agonized blue window bleaker.

Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.

Absence! My heart grows tense

as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.

(This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)

from Waking in the Blue, by Robert Lowell

.

blue window

.
.

still life -- the library

François Foisse, Still Life - The Library, c. 1741.
Oil on canvas. 24 1/4 x 30 3/8 in
from The Wadsworth Atheneum

.
.

more blue :-)

Self-portrait with blue guitar, David Hockney

"Literature has been a mainspring of some of his most important and interesting pictures: in the 1960s he made a series of etchings inspired by Cavafy’s poems, and one of his most complex self-portraits, Self-Portrait with Blue Guitar (1977) came out of etchings he produced to illustrate Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’. This wonderfully self-referential portrait shows how many levels Hockney’s work can have: the Stevens poem itself was inspired by Picasso’s The Old Guitarist (1903), and the layers of inspiration are represented here by the realistic blue curtain which is pulled aside to reveal the artist, working at a table to produce a Picasso-esque outline of a blue guitar, while sitting on a cartoon-like outline of a chair, poised inside a child’s outline of a house, watched over by his own signature tulips and a bust of Dora Maar."

J. Flanders

.

the blue curtain

Adriaen van der Spelt (Dutch, 1630-1673)
Frans van Mieris (Dutch, 1635-1681)

Trompe-l'Oeil Still Life with a Flower Garland and a Curtain, 1658

.

viennese window (iii)

.
.

viennese window (ii)

.
.

viennese window

.
.

church window

.
.
.

window-gazing

What are we to do with these spring days that are now fast coming on? Early this morning the sky was gray, but if you go to the window now you are surprised and lean your cheek against the latch of the casement.

The sun is already setting, but down below you see it lighting up the face of the little girl who strolls along looking about her, and at the same time you see her eclipsed by the shadow of the man behind overtaking her.

And then the man has passed by and the little girl's face is quite bright.




Kafka, Absent-minded Window-gazing
(short-story from the collection "Contemplation", Kafka's first-published book)


.

memory (ii)

.
.

memory

.
.

temple window

.
.

curves of incense

Threads of incense drift upwards
unending in my silent room—
a smoky portent, like cracks on a tortoise shell—
nine perfumed plumes twist.

An old mirror hides light with darkness—
embers flare within sullen ash.
The many folds of my silk curtain part—
what is most precious faces the wind.


Hyesim
tr. Ian Haight & T'ae-Yong Ho

.
.

Parisian interior

Lesser Ury (German, 1861-1931), Parisian Interior, 1881. Oil on canvas, 55.5 x 32.5 cm. Private collection.

.
.

curtain of light

Chromeus

.
.
.

the view inside

La fenêtre, Oil on canvas, 110 by 100 cm, 1936
Paul Delvaux

.

.

windows facing windows

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior of Courtyard, Strandgade 30


"In December 1898 Hammershøi moved into a seventeenth-century merchant house at Strandgade 30, Copenhagen. For the decade that he resided there in a second-floor apartment he painted more than sixty canvases depicting the rooms of the dwelling, often including his wife, Ida. Influenced by Dutch seventeenth-century painting, particularly the quiet interiors of Jan Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch, Hammershøi's meditations on the interior spaces of his apartment are psychologically enigmatic. Here he renders the building's interior courtyard, with strong illumination focused on an open window. Three doorways at lower right, each obscured, lead, respectively, to the street, to a staircase, and to the cellar. The eccentric and irregular geometries created by walls and windows, overhangs and thresholds, in conjunction with the essentially monochromatic gray palette punctuated by restrained mauve, endow the composition with a distinctly disturbing quality. The opened window and doorways suggest human presence, but the overall effect is one of profound absence."

more 
here .

through the window of my hut

Through the window of my hut:
The sound of a koto
Searching for the right melody
Mingling with the sound
Of the wind blowing in the pines.
 

Otagaki Rengetsu



.

girl in a window

The girl in a springtime window
Calls to awaken a young priest
Barely a man
His sutras toppled
By her dangling sleeve

うらわかき僧よびさます春の窓ふり袖ふれて經くづれきぬ

Akiko Yosano
more

.
.