staring, hypnotized, into the eyes of my reflection

Before they built the apartment blocks across the street, before everything was screened off and suffocating, I used to watch Bucharest through the night from the triple window in my room above Ştefan cel Mare. The window usually reflected the room’s cheap furniture—a bedroom set of yellowed wood, a dresser and mirror, a table with some aloe and asparagus in clay pots, a chandelier with globes of green glass, one of which had been chipped long ago. The reflected yellow space turned even yellower as it deepened into the enormous window, and I, a thin, sickly adolescent in torn pajamas and a stretched-out vest, would spend the long afternoon perched on the small cabinet in the bedstead, staring, hypnotized, into the eyes of my reflection in the transparent glass.

from Mircea Cartarescu's novel The Blinding, tr. Sean Cotter

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facade

"Windows (Facade of a House)," by Egon Schiele, 1914

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room with a view

David Hockney

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.

in the studio

Henri Joseph Harpignies（French, 1819-1916）

watercolour

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.

high windows

When I see a couple of kids

And guess he’s fucking her and she’s   

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,   

I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—   

Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

Like an outdated combine harvester,

And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if   

Anyone looked at me, forty years back,   

And thought, That’ll be the life;

No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide   

What you think of the priest. He

And his lot will all go down the long slide   

Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:   

The sun-comprehending glass,

And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Philip Larkin

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Greenwich Village, NYC

André Kertész, Greenwich Village, New York (woman reading in fire escape window), 1963

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Old Woman at a Winter Window

From squared-off quarters
through a frosted pane
I stare into the glittering
quartz of the air, marbled
with tiny streamers from
valiant chimneys down the valley.

It is as if we pit ourselves
against congealing it.
We claim these square ceiling and walls
and floor from the immensity
as all that have for us,
meaning, against the encroaching ice,

the ice that somehow 

signals another space, a fearful
glorious amplitude.

Old Woman at a Winter Window 

by Margaret Avison

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open the love-window

At night, I open the window
and ask the moon to come
and press its face against mine.
Breathe into me.
Close the language-door
and open the love-window.
The moon won't use the door,
only the window.



Rumi


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pensive

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907)
A Girl's Head in front of a Window 1906


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the blue window

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like flies

die menschen gleichen den fliegen
die nicht begreifen
warum sie nicht mit dem kopf
durch das glas der fensterscheibe
in das erlösende licht
gelangen können

Hans Arp

men are like flies

who can't understand

why they can't pass

their heads 

through the windowpane 

in order to bathe in the light 

of salvation

tr. Michael Tweed

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.

Am Fenster (II)

Zum Fenster sehe ich
hinaus, es ist so schön,
hinaus, es ist nicht viel. 
Es ist ein wenig Schnee,
auf den es regnet jetzt.
Es ist ein schleichend Grün,
das in ein Dunkel schleicht.
Das Dunkel ist die Nacht,
die bald in aller Welt
auf allem Schnee wird sein, 
auf allem Grün wird sein.
Hin schleicht sich freundlich Grün
ins Dunkel, ach wie schön.
Am Fenster sehe ich's.

.
I see at the window,
so nice,
outside, it's not much.
There's a little snow
on which it rains now.
There's a creeping green
that creeps into the darkness.
Darkness is night,
soon it will cover the world,
it will cover the snow,
it will cover the green.
This kind green creeping
into the darkness; oh how nice.
At the window I see it.


Robert Walser
tr. Daniele Pantano

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