“It is not at all an idle matter trying to define what a human being is. If one limits oneself to the creatures existing on earth today, there are no ambiguities, but doubts arise and grow more and more gigantic….” —Primo Levi, from Other People’s Trades, “A Bottle of Sunshine.”
I was looking for a book with windows. It was getting to be late and I gathered a few titles—May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, among them: the covers of which, at least in the editions I hold, depict windows.
A friend and I were talking about the infidelity of the mind (neither of us created that reference in the moment)—by which I mean any human opposition or stagnation to use our imagination to keep moving, to move forward, to design ways out from the usual traps society, family, or external expectation placed on us, sublimating our curiosity, desires, respect for a definition-less range of harmless and beautiful pursuits.
We need more doors, I state, as if our minds and society are spheres of logos, prismatic on the inside, and yet we have become appeased to have limited entry. We deny ourselves the keys.
“We need more port towns.”
“We need to bring back Main Street.”
I have a small part in an office share in a Vermont town that has been bringing back Main Street, actually. It helps the location that a railroad still runs through it, half a block from “Main Street.”
Vintage clothing, art, recyclables, more than one theater, a print center, multicultural food, a vibrant assisted living facility (that looks like Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother ship), a cartooning college, museum, brewery, old and new housing, redesigned sidewalks, streetlamps, a hotel, and of course the train station.
I remember Patti Smith’s comment that if she encounters a wall without a door she makes one.
I am enthused about doors, and a window is just a smaller idea of a door.
When I taught cartoonists, briefly, I assigned windows to them. Each pane might be a panel inside of which existed a scene, a changing scene, if only noteworthy for one image. Absence and presence reconfigured in this arrangement. There could be no “without” within the realm of viewing; “no ideas but in things,” as the American poet and doctor William Carlos William urged (and cautioned).
I wonder if we’ve all become “all about the idea”: AI, brand concept, endowed generalizations. I propose, as others have before me, that such narrowing leads to a limit to access, conformity, discrimination, domination, war.
Here’s the thing: the door’s the thing. Windows that open. Berths open to open sea.
There’s journey in a single pane. Every line: a shot/ a shout/ a solitude; similarity.
May Sarton writes, “I don’t know whether the inward work is achieving something or whether it is simply the…light, but I begin to see my way again, which means to resume myself. This morning two small miracles took place.” Sarton shares with us that one of these “miracles” was made possible because of a window near her bed. The other, after the first urged her up and outside, was external light itself—focused as a “ray”—upon a “Korean chrysanthemum, lighting it up like a spotlight….” “Seeing it was like getting a transfusion,” Sarton insists.
I’ve noticed that Sarton’s publisher added a kind of subtitle: “The intimate diary of a year in the life of a creative woman”—and I’ve noted that hers is a journal of “a” solitude—not “all” solitudes, not “the” solitude (as if endless or permanent), only “a” solitude—like one of many pebbles, shells, petals, waves, passages unique in character and a thing. Considering her intention and despite the occasional stereotype held over by an even older generation (it happens on p.113 of my Norton paperback), Sarton’s other subjects explain why we let her get away with what she only knew then how to phrase (otherwise, one occurrence can ruin a book for the future). We learn to cringe if we are sensitive to the implications.
Michael Ondaatje, from a poem called “Buried 2” in his 1998 book Handwriting, writes:
We drove cylinders into the earth
to discover previous horizons
…as if “We” might be looking for another window, in this case a window into the past. In a following section, Ondaatje describes poets who “hid within forests when they were hunted/ for composing the arts of love and science/ while there was war to celebrate.”
The cover of the copy I have shows someone’s head resting on their left hand. The image is framed like a window, as if to suggest: within this Handwriting is a life, not just words.
This is what I’ve been trying to get at in a book that will be coming out in September.
As if to counter Sarton, Ondaatje itemizes “What we lost.” Among them:
The interior love poem
the deeper levels of the self
landscapes of daily life
[and]
The rule of courtesy — how to enter
*
I finish this, looking out my shared office window toward the west, as blue isn’t the Blues and pink isn’t a bruise. And Andrea von Kampen plays on my tiny phone (“like a radio transmitting across time” as my poet mentor Allen Ginsberg exclaimed), and this enthuses me, for I’m hearing this music for the first time—similar to how we might meet a stranger in a port town, in a railroad town, and where so many things seem so much more possible than permanent solitude or ongoing war. Von Kampen sings so sweetly, as if held by gravity but lifted up in light:
And before I buy a gun/ I’ll get to know my neighbor
“Life in slow motion,” von Kampen sings in a song called “The Wait,” providing commentary to every pane ever washed or cracked—or caked with nature.
“And the voice was life” writes Max Porter in a section I’ll leave you to open and discover.
Ondaatje again, as if the poet’s waving to each visitor like a keeper of harbors, espousing neither an ad or an aspiration for the location but only the allegory of the observed:
The small boats of solitude.
Primo Levi, in an assessment from “A Bottle of Sunshine”—a title that holds as much existential irony as possibility, ends the chapter with this observation: “In our role as builders of receptacles we hold in our hand the key to maximum benefit and maximum harm: two contiguous doors, two locks, but only one key.”
What is a bottle if not a boat in reverse, a container for water—or fitting replacements? What key do we not already hold?
I add:
Knowing our previous horizons, open your eyes to the window; find the door. Treat the harmed or make a trade for a maximum benefit doing no harm. And, someday, maybe someday, accept that there will be a transfusion from sunlight.
Peter Money is a poet, playwright, and author of the novel Oh When the Saints (Dublin) whose mentor was the Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg. His writing has appeared in The Irish Times, The Sun, American Poetry Review, on The Writer’s Almanac and RTE Radio 1 Ireland (“Loves: Silence and the Music of JS Bach”). Peter plays in the band Los Lorcas (their latest album Wild Island tracks are online) and his memoir about “leavings” is forthcoming later in 2026.
