Windows on the World

by Matteo Pericoli

  BERLIN, GERMANY

  2010

  Christine Angot

  What I see from the window is what made me decide to take this apartment, I immediately thought I would see the garden from my desk, even if I no longer pay much attention once I am sitting in my chair, lowering the shades in the summer so as not to be blinded by the light, drawing them back completely in the winter to see the sky in full, looking at the slate roofs, worrying for the bamboo when the leaves turn yellow, turning the chair over when it rains, I have a connection with all that, more than with the few figures I happen to glimpse at their own windows, and I look, look often, look all the time, having the feeling that my eyes will never get the better of the swaying branches, or the little feet of the folding table, or the small heather flowers, I imagine the scent of lavender in the planter, and, when the seasons turn, I dream of speeding up or slowing down the changes, knowing that that will never happen, wanting in fall for the leaves to remain hanging high up in the trees as long as possible, hoping in spring that this time it will last forever, that the flowers will no longer fade, loving, at last, in autumn the glow that appears beneath the window, preventing my gaze from going beyond the railing in winter, trying to bear the bad mood of the short-tempered concierge who claims to be inspecting my way of watering the plants, resenting his warnings as doctrinaire, and a desire to spoil my happiness.

  PARIS, FRANCE

  2014

  2014

  Jon McGregor

  About half the view from my window is the rest of the building I’m in, and the many windows from which other creative industry types are presumably gazing while they await inspiration. (At least, I imagine they’re creative industry people. I don’t actually know any of them; we pass each other in the stairwell from time to time, and avoid conversation.) It’s a good-looking building; a lace factory built in the mid-nineteenth century, when they knew about proportions and symmetry and specified tall windows to let in the light. The rest of the view is taken up with whoever’s coming and going in the street, and the row of once-grand houses opposite. These are the backs of the houses, the one-time tradesman’s entrances; the frontages open into a broad green avenue which it’s easy to imagine will one day be regentrified. For now, the tradespeople and the no-trades-people come and go through all the entrances.

  There’s a large security camera on the other end of the building, and I often see it pan and tilt. I wonder who’s watching. Perhaps they’re writing sonnets, and looking for inspiration.

  At the top of the road is a fee-paying girls’ school, and in the mornings the girls are hustled from their parents’ cars to the school doors. They’re all driven here. This isn’t the kind of neighborhood where fee-paying school pupils live.

  The parking regulations on the street are quite particular, and at least twice a day the parking wardens come racing by on their liveried scooters. There are two of them, and they seem very young and very pleased to be riding scooters for a living. When they issue tickets they do it quickly, glancing up at the many windows of the building behind them.

  This is where I work. Obviously I don’t look out of the window much, caught up as I am in the constant fever of creativity. But, you know. Now and again.

  NOTTINGHAM, UNITED KINGDOM

  Andrea Levy

  When I was young my mum used to complain that I spent too much time daydreaming. That was because I liked to stare at the sky. She thought that while I was dreaming I could be doing something useful as well, like knitting. Now that I am a writer, I have the privilege of daydreaming as part of my job. And I still love to gaze at the sky. The view from my workroom in my North London house has a lot of sky, and I couldn’t work without it. There are never any structured thoughts in my head when I look up. They just come and go and change shape like the clouds.

  I have a wonderful view of Alexandra Palace. This is not a royal palace but a nineteenth-century leisure center for exhibitions and events—a people’s palace, known locally as “Ally Pally.” It was the place from which the world’s first regularly scheduled television transmissions were broadcast, in the 1930s, and the famous antenna is still there. Below it I can see the doors of the studios where modern television began, and I find that thrilling. The palace is still a venue for the occasional exhibition, but mostly it just sits there on the hill, waiting for someone to find a good use for it in this information age.

  In the foreground, close to my house, is a school. I have come to know the sounds of that school so well that it has become my clock. As early as seven-thirty the first children arrive, twittering into the playground like the first birds of the morning. During the din of their playtimes I always stop working to have a cup of tea.

  The school sits among Victorian row houses just like mine, with their jumbled chimney pots and television aerials. When I see them under my mass of sky, with Ally Pally up on the hill, then I know I am home.

  LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

  2010

  Mike McCormack

  I have lived in this house on the edge of Galway City for over five years now, and for a couple of hours a day I sit with my feet up on the windowsill and look out over this cul-de-sac. And no matter what time of day I sit here it always seems to be the middle of the afternoon. The place is constant, not given to mood swings or tantrums, just that tree and the sweep of tarmac which curves along by the green, nothing much to hold the eye or interest. Of course this is precisely the kind of stillness in which the mind’s eye gets lost—vista as vortex. From time to time the stillness is broken up by a car or a child or a stray dog crossing the green. Sometimes a ball rolls into view. These are all quietly interesting but sooner or later they meld into the stillness of the place.

  Today it’s raining—patient, steady rain which will keep falling into the night. That’s December rain, nothing new or unusual about it. Beyond the rooftops the sky has lowered down in heavy gray folds. Two years ago we had snow here for the first time, and for nearly a month the whole place was blanketed in soft whiteness. And while snow added little to the stillness of the place, for a short while it looked like it was elsewhere.

  GALWAY, IRELAND

  2012

  Leila Aboulela

  When we first moved here in September, the tree outside the window was green and I imagined I saw a navel orange dangling from one of its branches. This turned out to be the first cluster of autumn leaves. Aberdeen is noted for its granite buildings and I first encountered these chimneys in novels because when I was growing up in Sudan we had no need for heating. All my novels were written in different countries—in Doha, in Abu Dhabi, in Jakarta—but I wrote my first novel in another part of Aberdeen. In Jakarta I wrote about London and in Abu Dhabi I wrote about 1950s Sudan. The view from the window never encroached on the writing because the novels were incubating long before that particular move.

  It is good to write and then look up at the sky, at the uninterrupted view of the tops of houses. When I am on a roll, there is a pressure of meanings clambering to be words, there is a gush that needs to be controlled or at least manipulated and the respite from this turbulence is always the clean familiar sky.

  From this window, I saw the leaves dry out and fall, pulled by the November wind. Now it’s March and I’m curious to see the first green leaf. I am geared up to witness a renewal. This anticipation is a faith exercise. Every day I train myself to believe that this tree will bloom; every day I remind myself that what is dead can come back to life again.

  ABERDEEN, UNITED KINGDOM

  2013

  Andri Snær Magnason

  This is my window. Or my windows—the view from my living room, where I sit and write. Might not seem very inspiring. I wish I could offer green mossy lava, roaring waves, a glacier mountaintop. I do have other spaces—in an abandoned power station, a favorite fisherman’s café by the harbor, a summer hous
e on the Arctic Circle—but this is my honest view, what I really see most of the days. This house was built in the 1960s when people were fed up with lava and mountains; they were migrating to the growing suburbs to create a new view for themselves. The young couple who dug the foundation with their own hands dreamed of a proper garden on this barren, rocky strip of land. They dreamed of trees, flowers, shelter from the cold northern breeze. What is special depends on where you are, and here, the trees are actually special. They were planted fifty years ago like summer flowers, not expected to live or grow more than a meter. The rhododendron was considered a miracle, not something that could survive a winter. It looks tropical, with Hawaiian-looking pink flowers; Skúli, the man who built the house and sold it to me half a century later, took special pride in it.

  I am not a great gardener. We are thinking of buying an apple tree, though they don’t really thrive in this climate. I would plant it like a flower, not really expect it to grow, and hope for a miracle.

  REYKJAVIK, ICELAND

  2013

  2014

  Karl Ove Knausgaard

  I love repetition. I love doing the same thing at the same time and in the same place, day in and day out. I love it because something happens in repetition: Sooner or later, the heap of sameness, accumulated through all the identical days, starts to glide. That’s when the writing begins.

  The view from my window is a constant reminder of this slow and invisible process. Every day I see the same lawn, the same apple tree, the same willow. It’s winter, the colors are bleak, there are no leaves, and then it’s spring, the garden is bursting with green. Even though I see it every day, I’m not able to notice the changes, as if they take place in a different time frame, beyond the range of my eye, in the same way high-frequency sounds are out of reach of the ear. Then the slow explosion of flowers, fruits, heat, birds, and insane growth we call summer is here, then there’s a storm, and the apples lie in a circle under the tree. The snowflakes melt the instant they touch the ground, the leaves are brown and leathery, the branches naked, the birds all gone; it’s winter again.

  In my youth, I considered Cicero’s claim, that all a man needs to be happy is a garden and a library, utterly bourgeois, to be a truth for the boring and middle-aged, as far as possible from who I wanted to be. Perhaps because my own father was somewhat obsessed with his garden and his stamp collection. Now, being boring and middle-aged myself, I have resigned. Not only do I see the connection between literature and gardens, those small areas of cultivating the undefined and borderless, I nurture it. I read a biography on Werner Heisenberg, and it’s all there, in the garden, the atoms, the quantum leaps, the uncertainty principle. I read a book about genes and DNA, it’s all there. I read the Bible, and there’s the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. I love that phrase, “in the cool of the day,” it awakens something in me, a feeling of depth on sunny summer days that hold a kind of eternal quality, and then the winds from the sea come rushing in the afternoon, shadows grow as the sun sinks slowly on the sky, and somewhere children are laughing. All this in the cool of the day, in the midst of life, and when it’s over, when I’m no longer here, this view will still be. This is also what I see when I look out my window, and there’s a strange comfort in that, taking notice of the world as we pass through it, the world taking no notice of us.

  GLEMMINGEBRO, SWEDEN

  2014

  Nastya Denisova

  I’ve been living here for four months. The center of the city. Fifth floor. I usually look out the window at night, but it’s not exactly a window—it’s the door of a balcony. I can see all the windows of the building opposite mine.

  I see how, from a window on the right, they regularly throw out plastic bags of trash onto the roof of the one-story building in the courtyard. But I don’t know from which window, exactly—I follow the bags, and when I shift my gaze to the windows they’re all closed, identical, except for the one that has a piece of green plywood instead of glass.

  From a window on the left side of the building, people throw garbage without bags. Brown plastic beer bottles and, for some reason, heaps of metal tops from jars of homemade preserves. I see the man who throws all this from the window of his kitchen, leaning out the window and looking down. He looks down and spits. His cigarette butt has set some dead grass on fire. He spits for a very long time. He goes out and comes back with a bottle of water. He pours down the water. He throws the bottle out.

  In the windows of the second floor are the kitchen and the back rooms of a restaurant. They’re always throwing cardboard boxes out the windows. When the boxes start to block the little back courtyard, someone piles them up and they disappear. In the winter, covered in snow, the boxes become monolithic, angular snow architecture. And if you didn’t already know, you wouldn’t be able to say what they are.

  From the window opposite me, cheerful teenagers fling DVDs. Maybe it’s a dorm room. Are they using them like throwing stars, or just tossing DVDs out the window? Have they noticed me? Two discs land on the balcony, through the door that I’ve been watching. Someone has drawn large, colorful butterflies on their surface.

  (Translated from the Russian by Sophie Pinkham.)

  ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA

  G. Mend-Ooyo

  When I was young, every morning I would take our hobbled horse and walk it in the dawn light. My father would say, “Sleep late like a horse. Rise early like a bird.” As I walked with the horse, I was very happy to have the little birds fly just above the light of dawn as they sang.

  The rhythm of each morning of my life still moves to the beat of my lovely childhood. From the window of my home in the center of Ulaanbaatar, I grasp the pale light in the east. Just as I used to bring in the horses pastured on the wild steppe, I spend time recollecting in my mind many thoughts that have taken flight. The images of life, transected by the window, are a chiaroscuro.

  I can clearly see the great seat of learning that is the National University of Mongolia. Sometimes it seems to be an image hanging on walls. A few steps from the window is my writing desk, made from Mongolian pine wood. When I sit at the desk, the world shifts into a different space. The history books grow thicker. There is no time to watch what goes on beyond my window.

  ULAANBAATAR, MONGOLIA

  2013

  Harris Khalique

  In the afternoon when the sun is blazing and in early evening when its orange hue allows me to stare into the horizon, I look out of this window in my office that opens into a terrace but offers a wider view. I see the palatial houses and imagine the few who live there in luxury. Then I think of the many who serve them—who hurl rolls of newspapers onto their porches, bring groceries, drive cars, sweep floors, toil in the sizzling kitchens. They dwell in shanty settlements ensconced within the affluent neighborhoods or live in crammed quarters in the backyards of these houses.

  Before dusk I can look beyond the trees and catch a clear glimpse of the thin-looking white minarets of the Faisal Mosque, one elegant and expansive structure on the slopes of the Margalla Hills. These minarets remind me of the worst dictator we have had. He lies buried in the gardens of this mosque while we still struggle to rein in the beasts of ignorance and bigotry he unleashed.

  Last week when it stopped raining after several hours, I decided to go beyond the window and walk across the terrace to look over the street from above. I saw a young girl squatting by a small puddle and folding paper into boats. An odd mix of intense sorrow and great hope enveloped my heart.

  ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN

  2013

  Rana Dasgupta

  I have come to realize that I do not love solitude as much as I think. It is always with happy anticipation that I arrive in my study: alone, at last, to write! But once the door is closed I have a paradoxical sense of loss, as if I am cut off from my source. Is this why I spend such
an unreasonable amount of time staring out the window?

  The rampant energy of Delhi, this city of almost twenty million people, presses in on my leafy street. Most families around here arrived as refugees from the horrors of India’s partition in 1947. To protect themselves from such a thing ever happening again, they built solid rows of houses—which are nonetheless turning to vapor in the white heat of the city’s twenty-first-century economic boom. One of the houses in this drawing has already disappeared, to be replaced, inevitably, by another block of flats. In the top left you can see the steel zigzags of Nehru Stadium, centerpiece of the 2010 Commonwealth Games, whose preparations involved a stupefying scale of destruction and rebuilding around the city.

  The street is always active. A young turbaned Sikh paces unceasingly on the balcony opposite, talking on his mobile phone. Migrant laborers working on the new buildings have built lean-tos around the corner; their wives forage for firewood downstairs while their children play with a ball nearby. Passing vegetable sellers sing their wares. Dogs bicker. An old man sits outside in the sun to get a shave from a barber. Neighbors argue over parking spaces.