Windows Opening on the World

Somewhere among the muddled memories of my High School days is a line of poetry that refers to “Magic casements opening on...faerie lands forlorn”. Or something to that effect. The poet is either Keats or Coleridge of the group of English poets then known as the “Romantic Poets”, later, as the “Lake Poets”. I remember it because my English Litt. teacher hated it and expressed his loathing at every opportunity.

I couldn’t understand why he disliked it so much. There were numerous other passages that to me were just as overblown.

Besides, to me, windows had always seemed as, well, windows, letting in the riches of the outside world. I wasn’t much of an outdoors kid, so for me, windows were an important conduit to the world outside.

They let in the clean fresh breezes after rain. The “Demarara” windows at rented seaside vacation chalets, large slabs of solid wood or framed wooden jalousies, hinged at the top and resting on a broad shelf-like sill that jutted out from the wall, and propped open with a stick, framed tranquil expanses of sea with an occasional fisherman’s pirogue moving too slowly to leave a wake, just a transitory thin furrow. The fragrance and colors of Tropical flora came into the house through windows. People talked to each other through their windows. The palette and pastry sellers, the women who did the laundry, the postman, all announced themselves through the front windows.

Windows protected you from the forbidding aspects of your world, like lightning and thunder, and the dark of night. And every now and then, by accident of course, I batted or threw a ball through the glass pane of a closed window touching off a less than pleasant encounter with the neighbors or my parents.

After I left the Tropics and woke up on my first morning in London I realized that windows could open onto a lonely, drab, forlorn world of stark chimney pots vague, gray and ghostly in their shrouds of coal polluted air. Close the sashes as tightly as you could and the bleak, damp air still crept in and wailed and rattled as it did.

New windows rapidly began opening when I went overseas to study. They were metaphorical windows: opportunities that opened on to new vistas of career and personal development.

There have been memorable windows along my travels: my hotel room in Vienna with twelve foot ceilings and tall windows draped with heavy velvet curtains that looked out across to the Opera House and down below, on the busy Ringstrasse with its trolleys and a walking street with its patisseries and fine shops. A panorama of snow-covered jagged Alps and the quaint ancient wooden covered bridge filled my hotel window at Lake Lucerne, Switzerland. The fantasy of a city built on water, that magical element of my childhood, eventually fulfilled itself in the view of the canals of Venice from a hotel window. In the window of my cruise ship docked in Alicante, Spain, the defiant, turreted walls of the Moorish fort marching across a hill still glowered defiantly as they did at attackers centuries ago.

For various reasons, but mostly because airports have become such a nuisance and planes beset by irritating, unnecessary and unexpected annoyances, I haven’t travelled much recently, but I have found a rich source of wondrous windows to a world far from forlorn in the form of live webcams.

As I sit by my fireside, at the touch of an icon on my handheld iPod Touch a panoply of windows puts me into any kind of live milieu, indoors or outdoors, that I can wish for. There are sunny beaches and resorts to escape to when the chill, dark weather of Seattle closes in. The pandas, tigers and other exotic animals in zoos tumble and prowl. College campuses and bookstores, bars, restaurants, museums, pachinko parlors and even a barbershop in Tokyo, construction sites, cruise ships at sea...something is open at any time of day or night.

My favorite scenes though are of city centers. I have become well acquainted with the daily rhythm of life at a busy intersection of a city in Hungary and another in Bulgaria. The webcams at those two sites offer especially fine resolution in their pictures, have a good frame rate so that movement seems pretty natural and both have functions such as panning, zooming and tilting that can be controlled by me sitting here thousands of miles away.

Those cities are 8 and 9 hours ahead of my time, so at my nighttime I join in the bustle early in their workday: the trams closely following each other, picking up and letting out their passengers, cars and delivery trucks circling the traffic roundabout, the people dressed in their winter coats hustling along or stopping to chat and gesture, going into and out of business places. The pictures are sharp enough to distinguish some facial features. Once I could even conjecture a snippet of the conversation of a group of three people waiting for their trolley: one of them gestured, and the other lifted his foot and pointed at his shoe. “Yes. New pair of shoes...like them?” They were all slightly just larger than large ants, five or six thousand miles away, but it was like being there, a tourist chancing upon a conversation.

After I wake up on my morning I can observe the scene at the end of their day: employees pushing large trash bins out to the sidewalks to be emptied later then walking off with a shopping bag, or returning to the shop’s door to check that it is locked before driving away in a car that has pulled up to the curb for them.

The city is shutting down for the night: trolleys are less frequent now, the traffic and pedestrians almost all gone. Traffic lights blink to empty streets. I feel as though I should be turning up the collar of my winter coat, checking the door one more time to see if its secure, then walking out of view.