A Million Windows

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The single holland blind in his room was still drawn down in late afternoon, although he would have got out of his bed and would have washed and dressed at first light. At the moment when he became a personage in this work of fiction, I supposed him to be seated at his small desk with his back to the glowing blind and to be reading, by the light of a desk-lamp, a sentence that he had written, perhaps only a few minutes earlier, at the head of a blank page. The sentence was his remembered version of a quotation, so to call it, that he had read long before. He recalls, or so I suppose, that the author of the sentence was a male person from an earlier century but he cannot recall the name of the author. The sentence is as follows: All our troubles arise from our being unwilling to keep to our room.

One of the commonest devices used by writers of fiction is the withholding of essential information. Much faulty fiction seems to derive from its author’s having been overly influenced by films, and yet I have to admit that authors were withholding information from readers long before the first film-scripts were written. Long before cameras could record such scenes, solitary characters were reported as sitting in quiet rooms or trudging across lonely landscapes at the beginnings of works of fiction while the readers of those works looked forward to learning, all in good time, the names of those characters, their histories, and even their motives and deepest feelings. The narrator of this work of fiction wants no reader of the previous paragraph to look forward to learning any such details in connection with the personage mentioned there.

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