The silk cotton tree at the center of my view, however, is mute. It saves its energy for the spring, when its vast, red, syrupy flowers will rain, indecently, over everything.
NEW DELHI, INDIA
2011
Xi Chuan
This is one of three windows in my study. The study is a one-bedroom apartment on the fifteenth floor. I don’t know how many stories this building has—probably twenty-five or more—but I have never been above the seventeenth floor.
During the day, if I don’t need to be at school, I stay in my study. It is crowded with books and old objects I collected from flea markets. I don’t have many friends visit me. I used to have a neighbor who was the manager of a small company that installed central heating. He occasionally came to talk with me, and I discovered that he had been a lover of poetry when he was young. I am sure he didn’t know who I was, though, so I told him that I was a teacher of literature, which is true.
The window faces east. When I sit at my desk in front of a wall of books, writing, the window is to my left. When I bought this apartment, which is a fifteen-minute walk from my home, in the late 1990s, the building standing in front of my window was already there, as was the bridge, but the building behind the bridge was not, so there was a vast view across the city. But the whole city of Beijing was a giant construction site in the 1990s and 2000s, and the view couldn’t last. Once I got used to the buildings in the window, I seldom looked out of it. No trees can reach the fifteenth floor, so no birds perch at my window. When I look out, I see cars running on the bridge. Nothing else.
BEIJING, CHINA
2012
Emma Larkin
My study window looks out over an incongruous jungle located in the heart of Bangkok. As the rest of the neighborhood is dominated by high-rises and town houses that have sacrificed yards for concrete parking spaces, all remaining wildlife seems to gravitate to our garden. Myopic fantail birds tap against the windowpanes, squirrels chew on the frayed corners of the shutters, and neon-green tree snakes sunbathe silently in the rain gutters. (I keep the number of a local snake catcher in my phone, as the lack of rats suggests the presence of a well-fed python somewhere in the vicinity.)
There is another type of wildness here, too. The ficus tree on the right-hand side of this drawing is where the house spirits now reside. At the advice of a fortune-teller, a tricolored band of cloth was tied around its trunk not long after we moved in. In accordance with Thai custom, regular offerings of food and flower garlands are laid out for the spirits so that they might be enticed to exist outside the house, rather than inside—a practice that has put a stop to most (but not all) of the inexplicable shadows and footsteps that flit through these old wooden rooms.
This scene encompasses both the wild and the urban, the known and the unknown. It reminds me that the dividing line between fact and fiction is less clearly defined here in Thailand and that the boundary between the two is porous. In such a place, stories thrive.
BANGKOK, THAILAND
2012
Ryu Murakami
I often stay at a high-rise hotel in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo to write. From the window of my room, I can see both a new skyscraper and a big park. When I look at the skyscraper, I think about the people who died before it was finished and never got to see it. It’s like a visual image of the truism that once you’re dead, there aren’t any more new sights for you. A lot of homeless people live in the big park. The blue vinyl tarps of their crude shelters are clustered throughout the grounds, but from this window all you can see are the leafy green trees.
(Translated from the Japanese by Ralph McCarthy.)
TOKYO, JAPAN
2010
Andrea Hirata
Since my childhood, I have rarely had the power to control where I can be. Life has not given me many choices. But after writing my first novel, I started thinking of leaving my place of employment, where I worked for almost twelve years. Though writing is a very risky way of making a living in Indonesia, I finally resigned from my job, and now I’ve got this strange feeling of relief.
The decision to write full-time meant I couldn’t afford to buy a house. A friend kindly offered me the use of his apartment in a thirty-six-story building full of newlywed couples in the southern area of Jakarta. I didn’t like my working space at first, but the scenery and everything going on outside have worked their magic on me. From a building right in front of my windows, I can observe the speed of the sunrises and sunsets. The voices of children playing, laughing, yelling, and crying on the playground crawl up to the eighth floor, where I write. Their voices sound so innocent from a distance.
JAKARTA, INDONESIA
2013
2011
Richard Flanagan
Unable to start writing, I look out past the veranda shadow. From my house on Australia’s Bruny Island—named in Year 1 of the French Revolution by a French royalist after himself—I can see Tasmania, home to a human civilization for ten thousand years before modern man arrived in France.
Just out of view on the left is a cove. There, in a remote outstation, less than sixty years after the visit by Bruni d’Entrecasteaux, that civilization’s forty-seven spirit-shocked survivors were dumped by the colonial authorities and left to die. After hearing of their story—he called it a “war of extermination waged by European immigrants”—H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, in which Martian immigrants exterminate Europeans.
In front, forty-spotted pardalotes sport in the white gum trees. They live off the sugary secretions on the trees’ underleaves, but because of global warming the white gums are dying. Of these tiny birds, no bigger than the giant moths that come out at evening, fewer than a thousand remain. In a decade they may be gone.
The fences that once kept the fairy penguins from nesting beneath the house are gone, because the last of the penguins failed to return six years ago. No one knows why. All that remains is a closed gate.
Below are sandstone bluffs and kelp-wracked beaches reeking of forbidden things. Gone too from the sea here are fish like the trevally and cod and trumpeter. No one can explain that either. Sometimes I dive on the shallow reefs here, looking for words.
Hidden from sight too is Kel the carpenter, descended from one of the forty-seven survivors, ostensibly fishing and probably just drinking up a beer and the sun and the light and the sound of water, the irreducible elements that remain. If he catches a good fish, he has promised to bring it round and we will grill it on the fire pit next to the aloe vera plants.
Bruni d’Entrecasteaux, perhaps in fear, or wonder, or both, called Bruny Island a place “separated from the rest of the universe.”
No more though.
And at this end of a view of what cities wreak but which no city ever sees, my eyes fall, the cursor winks, and I begin.
BRUNY ISLAND, AUSTRALIA
2014
Ceridwen Dovey
These days, I often write after dark, something I never used to do before my son was born when I had the luxury of working during my brain’s freshest daytime hours. Now I’ll take any hour I can get, day or night (but mostly night). The towering high-rise building in the distance, behind the palms, has been transformed from an aged, shabby hotel into a glass spaceship filled with new apartments, and until recently it was uninhabited. But lately I’ve been watching the apartments come to life with light at dusk, one by one, as the new owners move in and start to live their lives up in the sky. This part of Sydney has been subjected to intensive residential densification over the years, unstopped by the economic recession (which Australia dodged in some part, due to the minerals boom)—these massive apartment complexes turn up almost overnight like mushrooms along the Pacific Highway, many of them bought by Chinese property investors who have never set foot in Australia, as a kind of insurance against a future Chinese econom
ic bust. Locals tend to feel very strongly about these high-density apartment complexes. For some, they represent the beginning of the end, the lowest point of Sydney’s ridiculously overpriced property market; for others, they make urban sense—for a crowded city cordoned off to the north, west, and south by national parks and to the east by the ocean, the only way to grow is up. My response is more personal: I lived very happily in just such an apartment complex nearby for years, as did my parents. So I’ve been comforted watching through my window at night as the lights have been switched on, the glow of various lamps and overheads and bulbs as different as the lives of the inhabitants within. Each light-scape is unique, each life is unique, but our days and nights follow a similar pattern: Most of the lights are switched on at dusk, and most are out by just before midnight.
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
Rebecca Walker
I have been looking out this window for three years. I have stared out of these rectangular panes full of hope and also despair, giddy with inspiration to connect and overtaken with a throbbing desire to disengage. I suppose this is what writing is to me: gripping the rope that swings between reaching out and pulling in.
But whatever my mood, I have always loved the light beyond this window. I have always loved the quiet. I have loved my two empty chairs, sentinels awaiting their visitors, open to the promise of more. I have felt at home in this spot, on this road to the small village of Hana, on this tiny piece of rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I have loved the rain that pours down, thunderous and crashing, before sunshine, harsh and stunning, pierces through once again.
It so happens that I am leaving home this very week. My view is changing. I am moving on and forward to my new house of words. I say goodbye to this window with gratitude and relief. Ready for the next chapter.
MAUI, HAWAII, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
2013
Marina Endicott
By some spiral of fate and capitulation, instead of a street in the East Village or a shabby lane in London, I stare out at a suburban patio, a generous and quiet garden in Edmonton, Alberta.
Since buying this house from Ozzie and Harriet three summers ago, we’ve pretty much given the yard back to the squirrels and the magpies. People appear only as tops of heads walking down the alley, a zoetrope’s glints through the fence. Because I haven’t figured it out properly, the sprinkler comes on at odd hours, a sudden shower of inspiration or damping of pretension.
From inside, the garden looks like a reward: the drink on the terrace that is much more delicious in anticipation. But I turn away from the window. My desk faces a wall covered with images, notes, timelines, vaudeville photographs, and playbills; my keyboard sits in a small black space surrounded by piles of books and paper—the brain disgorged and arrayed. It’s a world frantic with life, all that paper funneling gradually into the computer screen.
When my eyes blear and I cannot focus any longer, the window is a way for my mind to blink, to clear my vision.
In wintertime I look out at the nothing that is not there; in summer, at an imaginary peaceful life. Early in the morning, I could drink coffee there, reading pages or doing some writerly thing with a fountain pen. But in reality, pernicious mosquitoes make it impossible to sit and work outside. It is a vision of the original Garden, and just as unobtainable.
I go to my desk and work. Like the street in the East Village, the garden goes on without me.
EDMONTON, ALBERTA, CANADA
2011
Sheila Heti
Can you see that beautiful shrub? It has no bald patch, right? That’s because the shy, moustached Portuguese man, who seems to live in that house alone, has spent the last six years standing in front of the hedge, where there was for so many years a bald patch. He’d stand before that patch, staring down at it for hours every day, even in the wintertime. When I’d come home from my errands and lock my bike to the pole, he would be there. When I went outside to check my mail, or if I looked up over my laptop, he would still be there.
At first I thought he was crazy. Then I began to think of him as more profound than other men. Why should we look at everything all around us? There is enough in a shrub.
This summer, the patch filled itself in. I guess he knew all along that it was not lacking water or fertilizer or chemicals or conversation. All it wanted was his attention. Now he stands at another empty patch.
I sit in a room lined with books, at a round teak dining table, on the second (top) floor of a Victorian house. He stares at his shrub as I stare at my computer. His body faces me and mine faces him. Our bodies are opposite each other every day, and we stare at things, and wait for the emptiness to fill in.
TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA
2012
Elmore Leonard
I sit here, in a suburb of Detroit, writing books by hand on yellow unlined pads with a view from my desk that offers distractions: Disney creatures on the patio, squirrels that come up for a handout and go nuts when I offer pistachios. Once I looked up from my work and a coyote was staring at me from the hedge a dozen feet away, though not with much interest. The squirrels know he’s there and stay hidden and the coyote wanders off, hoping to find a little dog in another yard. Several times I’ve seen a hawk, claws wrapped around the limb of an apple tree, waiting for prey who somehow know better than to reveal themselves. Distractions are good when I’m stuck in whatever it is I’m writing or have reached the point of overwriting. The hawk flies off, the squirrels begin to venture out, cautious at first, and I return to the yellow pad, my mind cleared of unnecessary words.
BLOOMFIELD VILLAGE, MICHIGAN, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
2011
Geraldine Brooks
The water never stops. The silver fall of it, the white churn of foam, the swirl and eddy smoothing out into the onward rush of the brook. There was a gristmill there once. In 1665, Benjamin Church, an English settler, dammed the little brook that the Wopanaak Indians of this place named the Tiasquam, harnessing the power of the waterfall to turn massive grindstones. The mill’s been gone for a couple of decades, the grindstone set as a doorstep at the entrance to my house. The dairy cows that once grazed the field are gone too. Since the only industry that happens here now is the work of my imagination, the wild things have their stream back. Infrequently, I’ll catch a glimpse of river otters sliding down the slick wet grass of the dam and muskrats browsing the banks. More common are the big snapping turtles—ancient, scarred-shelled veterans, who haul themselves out of the water to bask. Sometimes I’ll let my mare loose to graze under the cedar tree, but not too often: I want to protect the stream and let the wetland plants regenerate. One day, maybe, I’ll undo Benjamin Church’s work completely, tear down his dam and let the water find its natural course. Maybe then the herring will come back each spring, swift silver schools shimmering upstream to spawn.
WEST TISBURY, MASSACHUSETTS, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
2013
Barry Yourgrau
The view from my window is pretty awful. I’m at my building’s rear. I look straight at another building’s rear. When I stand gazing out (not often) I feel like a Peeping Tom and an exhibitionist. My neighborhood, Jackson Heights in Queens, is where the concept of “garden apartment building” originated. My building isn’t one of those. Neither is the building I face.
My place is dim. As someone who craves sunshine and vistas, I can’t say I’m wildly happy here. Admittedly, when this was my girlfriend’s apartment, she made everything cozy. She likes dimness: She’s Russian, she explains. Then she bought a condo nearby and I took over the place as my writing studio, as somewhere to keep my things . . .
We travel a lot. My girlfriend is an international restaurant critic. I return laden with postcards, calendars, hotel stationery, posters, soccer scarves, beach wraps, etc. These mementos comprise much of the colorful dusty spectacle that has inc
reasingly swamped my apartment.
The travel stuff is only part of it. I long had a storage space in Manhattan. There I kept, among other things, boxes of the books once in my late father’s library. Now I have my apartment. Now the never-opened boxes lie bulging under a dusty Mexican blanket beneath my girlfriend’s old colorfully draped dusty piano here. Buried but undead.
So my clutter, this side of my window, and dust are a problem. Odd how clutter both displays and hides . . . I’m working on a book about it. We’ll see.
QUEENS, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
2013
Teju Cole
I live on the second floor of a hundred-year-old row house in Brooklyn. But this is not the Brooklyn people think about when they think about writers living in Brooklyn. There are no cafés on my street, no bookshops in my neighborhood, and though there are shops that sell clothes, they are not the fashionable boutiques of Fort Greene or Williamsburg. My neighborhood is called Sunset Park. It lies between the Green-Wood Cemetery and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. The neighborhood is populated mostly by people from Puerto Rico, Mexico, China, and Southeast Asia. Most are recent immigrants.
Windows on the World Page 4