A Million Windows (2 page)

In the year when I became married, in the mid-1960s, I read the first volume of the autobiography of a male writer who was almost thirty years older than I and who had died fifteen years later after having been struck by a car when walking drunkenly across the street in a provincial city of this state. I remember my observing while I read his autobiography that the author used the present tense throughout the book and my deciding soon afterwards that I ought myself to use that tense throughout the work of fiction that I had been trying for several years to write. After having begun to write this paragraph, I remembered several details from my experience as a reader, nearly fifty years ago, of the autobiography mentioned, but the only one of those details that I was able to remember
before
I began to write the paragraph was my seeming to see dazzling points of light on a distant hillside during moments while I read that the author
claimed to remember his having seen often as a child, while he watched from a balcony in the late afternoon, and when the light from the declining sun fell at a certain angle, what he called sumless distant windows like spots of golden oil.

Given that the book in my hands was an autobiography, I surely supposed, when I first read the report of the glowing widows, that the author himself had seen several times during his childhood just such windows as he claimed to have seen. Today, having read and written much during nearly fifty years since, I suppose no such thing. Today, I understand that so-called autobiography is only one of the least worthy varieties of fiction extant. Given that what I read was in the present tense, and recalling now how young I was at the time and how little I had read, I can hardly doubt that I supposed also, when I first read the report of the glowing windows, that what I was then experiencing as a reader was the nearest equivalent that I could hope to experience to whatever it was that the author would have experienced, nearly thirty years before my birth, when he sometimes saw from a balcony in the late afternoon reflected sunlight in distant windows. Today, having read and written and supposed much during nearly fifty years since, I suppose no such thing.

While I was reading the report of the richly lit distant windows, I would probably have counted myself fortunate to know the approximate location, in the world where I then sat reading, of the actual balcony where the author of the autobiography was reported to have watched often as a child
and of the distant hillside where the windows were strangely lit. Earlier in the text, the author had named the street where he had lived during certain years of his childhood. I happened to know that same street and was even able to visualise, while I read, an approximation of the distant hillside where the windows had sometimes reflected the late sunlight. I suspect that I would have paused soon after I had read the passage in which the windows were compared to drops of golden oil and would have speculated as follows. Given that I know the very street where the autobiographer lived during certain years of his childhood, and given further that I am able to visualise, while I read, an approximation of the actual hillside that he sometimes saw in the distance, I am more fortunate than the many readers who do not know the street and are unable to visualise the hillside. I am more fortunate because I am able, if I choose, to visit nowadays the very street from which the autobiographer looked out sometimes at least twenty years before my birth, to wait in the street until a certain moment on a certain sort of late afternoon, and then to assess the aptness of the autobiographer's comparing a number of distant windows to sumless spots of golden oil. Today, having read and written and speculated much during nearly fifty years since, I could never thus speculate.

Once, or it may have been more than once, during the mid-1940s, I travelled with my parents and my siblings by road from a large provincial city in the north of this state to a smaller city in the south-west. We stopped for our midday meal in a large city in the inner west of the state – the same city, as it happens,
where the autobiographer, more than thirty years later, would be struck and killed while drunkenly crossing a street. Travel by road was far slower then than now, and we spent most of the afternoon travelling further towards the smaller city, our destination. When the sun was low in the sky, we were still crossing the extensive plains that occupy much of the south-west of this state. If this paragraph were part of an autobiography or of a conventional work of fiction, then I might well report at this point that I saw at least once, and far across the extensive plains mentioned, a sight that I surmised was a reflection of the light from the declining sun in one or more upper windows of a house of at least two storeys. I might even go on to report that my reading, twenty years later, a certain autobiographical passage in which distant windows are likened to spots of golden oil was in some way connected with my reporting, in the next-to-last paragraph of my first published work of fiction, that the chief character of that work, while travelling with his parents across the extensive plains mentioned, is enabled to see in mind certain details that he has previously been unable so to see. This present work being neither autobiography nor fiction of the same order as the work that I began to write, in the present tense, in the mid-1960s, I need report here only the detail first mentioned in the seventh paragraph of this present work. I need report here only that the window first mentioned in the first paragraph of this present work of fiction might have seemed, at the moment when it was first mentioned, as a distant window might have seemed on an extensive plain to a narrator of an autobiography
or to a chief character of a work of fiction – might have seemed like a spot of golden oil, even though I myself have never seen any window with such an appearance.

One of the many devices employed by writers of fiction is the use of the present tense. I myself have written several works of fiction in the present tense. Soon after I had read the autobiography in which distant windows are likened to spots of golden oil, I began yet another of the drafts that I had already begun of a work of fiction that I had for long had in mind. The draft then begun was in the present tense, and when I had completed the draft, five years later, it remained so. Had I simply imitated the technique, so to call it, of the autobiographer? Had I supposed that my using the present tense would cause my reader sometimes to pause, as I had once paused after having read that certain distant windows resembled spots of golden oil? Had I further supposed that my having paused at that moment was the result of my having observed that the windows mentioned in the text seemed at that moment as clearly visible and their effect on me as palpable as if I had been observing actual windows from an actual distance? If I had thus supposed, then I might well have believed that the reading of a work of fiction resembles the watching of a film and even that the text of a work of fiction ought to resemble a film-script. I prefer to suppose that my using the present tense was in some way connected with my having reported in the first paragraph of my first work of
fiction that the chief character, a boy of nine years, is looking at a page of a calendar published by a religious order of the Catholic church in which calendar each of the twelve pages has in its lower half a grid of black lines on a background of yellow. For the chief character, the black and the yellow represent not a sequence of days but a map of remembered experiences in the provincial city where he lives; the black suggests the narrow strips of bitumen on the streets in the suburbs of the city while the yellow suggests the broad margins of those streets and the mostly unpaved footpaths, all of which are strewn with bright gravel from the former goldfields of the district. And just as he is able to follow any number of routes through the black and the yellow, so the boy, when he remembers, takes no account of any fixed temporal boundaries or sequences. As for the upper half of each page of the calendar, which is occupied by a coloured reproduction of some or another painting of Biblical scenes or characters, the boy has learned from his parents and his teachers that his and their world is overhung by an altogether superior world, and if he has not learned also that that world has no days and no nights then he could hardly have failed to suppose that a personage looking thence down at his, the boy's, world would see not a record of something called time but a richly detailed map of an immense landscape.

For reasons that are no part of this work of fiction, I was required, thirty and more years ago, to read several books purporting to instruct readers in the techniques of fiction-writing. The books were divided into chapters with headings such as
Plot
,
Characters
,
Dialogue
, and
Theme and Meaning
. I long ago forgot most of what I read in the books, but while I was writing the previous paragraph I recalled something of what I read in a certain chapter headed
Flashbacks and Time Shifts
. I recalled not actual words but rather their import. I recalled the author's advising the intending writer of fiction to prepare the reader before introducing into the narrative any so-called flashback or time-shift. Thus, the writer might have a character look out from a car or a train at an apple-orchard before introducing as a flashback a scene from the character's childhood, which scene would have for its setting a garden overhung by an apple-tree. I can hardly believe that anything so foolish was once delivered as advice to intending writers. The author of the advice was himself a writer of fiction, although I forget his name and the titles of his two or three books, and I supposed, even when I first read his advice on flashbacks and time-shifts, that he had in mind, while he wrote, those films in which the pages of a desk-calendar fly back rapidly or in which the face of a staring or a sleeping character is obscured by swirling mists as a signal to the viewer that what follows is a scene from the past.

I am not about to assert, as the narrator asserted in a piece of fiction of mine first published twenty-five years ago, that time is non-existent and that what we denote by the word
time
is no more than our moving from one to another place in an infinite expanse. Instead, I restrict myself to claiming only that no sort of time exists in a work of fiction such as this, the setting of which is place after place in what I called earlier the invisible world.
The reader might care to observe how easily he or she reads the following paragraph, even though the matters there reported have no temporal connection with the matters reported in this and the previous few paragraphs.

Soon after I had read, in a weekly news-magazine from perhaps twenty-five years ago, a reference to a certain castle or, rather, to a certain image-castle, I began, as I ought to have reported earlier, to write this work of fiction. And yet I was still, it seemed, not wholly free from the influence of films that I had watched long before and could hardly recall. I foresaw myself writing, for example, about a man who preferred not to draw the blind or the curtain of his room except on a certain few afternoons of the year. If I had gone ahead with my first, misguided scheme, this, the fifth section of the book, would have comprised a brief account of a man who never failed, during every year of his long life, to mark certain days in late spring or in early summer. Those had been the days during his childhood when he had felt urged to draw the blind in the single window of the loungeroom of his parents' house in a provincial city in the north of this state and then to raise the window slightly so that the north wind would agitate the worn brown blind and would cause to appear in the dim room flashes of the fierce light from outside. Influenced, surely, by scenes from a film I had never seen nor would ever see – a film set in a castle known to me only from a single sentence in an article in a news-magazine – I foresaw
myself writing first about a man who would enact, as though for the benefit of a watcher, some or another ritual from his childhood as a demonstration that his life was all of a piece. Perhaps I even envisaged him in his dim room, on a day of hot north winds, as handling again some of the collection of glass marbles that he had kept by him throughout his life – the same marbles that had represented racehorses in one of his childhood rituals. But this misguided scheme, as I called it, not only seemed more suited to film than to fiction but lacked an appropriate setting. And then I, who have never seen any sort of castle nor any sort of European scenery, saw in mind an image of the only building where my true subject-matter might come into being and, around the building, the only scenery likely to surround such a building; and I foresaw myself writing not about pretend-characters enacting pretend-rituals but about fictional personages writing, on day after day during year after year, in a building of two or, perhaps, three storeys having several wings and numerous windows and being surrounded by mostly level grassy countryside.