Journal of the Plague year: Open windows

 We were often bored as children, a common plight before the digital age. A quote from Bachelard's The Poetics of Space speaks to this:

Alexander Dumas tells in his Memoires that, as a child, he was bored, bored to tears. When his mother found him like that, weeping from sheer boredom, she said: "And what is Dumas crying about?" "Dumas is crying because Dumas has tears," replied the six-year-old child. This is the kind of anecdote people tell in their memoirs. But how well it exemplifies absolute boredom, the boredom that is not the equivalent of the absence of playmates. 

My younger brother and I made the best of what was at hand. One item handy for wiling away a cold or rainy afternoon was a coffee table book my mother had. I wish I could remember what it was called, but it was something along the lines of 100 World Masterpieces. A large book with a brown cover, reminiscent of a huge family Bible, it was published in the 1930s. We loved it because of the large, glossy color plates. Every painting was European or American, ranging from the Middle Ages up through Van Gogh, as if no other culture existed.

This book riveted me--we were easily amused, thank goodness, or we might have burned the house down out of boredom (my brother actually did make a stab at that, lighting  matches and throwing them across the basement floor, which was luckily solidly tiled in asbestos). What particularly captured me were paintings like the Van Eyck below, because the people portrayed lived in places that seemed completely open to the elements. It was a dreamscape. As Miss Bates in Jane Austen's Emma might say: "This is meeting quite in fairy-land!"

The idea of no barrier between indoors and out except a few pillars or arches fascinated me.  What happened when it rained? How amazing would it be to be able to step outside without opening a door or to sit in a room open to the fresh air. Did it get too breezy or chilly? How could any of this be?

There were several of these kind of paintings: I can't remember if the Botticelli above or the Fra Angelico below were in the book, but they are similar to what I remember. What I most wanted was to live in such a place: it seemed magical.

 It is almost impossible now to recreate the intensity with which I entered into these paintings, as if I were really there, sitting with these people. The closest cognate is probably when, in Mary Poppins, the characters step into the world of the sidewalk chalk paintings and actually inhabit them.

Therefore, it seemed like a dream come true, bringing back a flood of childhood memories, when our house in Mexico had no glass on the windows, but was completely open and permeable to the outdoors. Wooden shutters alone kept out the elements. I was utterly taken with this.

View from our kitchen: no glass in the window

It surprised me that insects never swarmed in at night.  During the day, when I would look out the kitchen window above,  Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho would come to mind. When Emily escapes the Gothic castle, she lives an intensely romantic interlude in a cottage in the woods. Large, fragrant flowers and "ripening clusters of grapes hung round her little casement." We had no grapes, but I would think of that image often. I was surprised when I found that passage in Radcliffe that Emily's cottage, like ours, overlooked the sea: 

Vines, their purple clusters blushing between the russet foliage, hung in luxuriant festoons from the branches of standard fig and cherry trees, while pastures of verdure, such as Emily had seldom seen in Italy, enriched the banks of a stream that, after descending from the mountains, wound along the landscape, which it reflected, to a bay of the sea. There, far in the west, the waters, fading into the sky, assumed a tint of the faintest purple, and the line of separation between them was, now and then, discernible only by the progress of a sail, brightened with the sunbeam, along the horizon.

View to our porch

When I read that section of Udolpho the first time, the scene seemed a fantasia, too good to be true. It was not until I was in Mexico, opening my own casements, that I realized such a scene could be real--or that I connected my enjoyment of it to my early perusals of an art book.

Views from our wide open, glass free bedroom window

In recent years, I have been much taken with paintings that show scenes through open windows, such as this one below by Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell's (Virginia Woolf's sister's) lover. I found this in the Facebook feed of Camille de Fleurville, who used to put these paintings up by the dozens. And now I recognize why that is not surprising that I am drawn to them.

It is odd--or perhaps ordinary--but always striking--when lives come these full circles in surprising ways. Boredom is not such a bad thing, a good reminder in the time of quarantine, as it can cause us to stop and take a long look at what we might otherwise rush by. Circling back to Bachelard and his musings on boredom, he reminds us that the most intense boredom can be "the very germ of all freedom!"