Windows accompany our lives, punctuate them, bright or shady depending on the light, the seasons and our moods. Mediation between interior and exterior, they embody openness or confinement, escape or refuge. Along her recent paths, our collaborator Monique Durand opens a few windows overlooking the here or elsewhere, very contemporary or turned towards History. First article in a series of seven.
Is it the sight of the gray sky, light as a breath? Or the first tiny leaves of spring that the rain makes emerald? Or my rusty old freighters out in the bay? This morning, my window is worth a kingdom to me.
Our lives, when you think about it, are strewn with windows, perforated with openwork and shutters, skylights and panes, right in our houses, our apartments, our chalets. We are looking for hotels, motels, inns with breathtaking views, “rooms with a view” of the seas, deserts or mountains. We dream of setting sail for some spring, our eyes fixed in the porthole of a boat or an airplane.
The windows open onto something interior, meditative, in a sort of dialogue between the immense and the intimate. “The theme of the window leads us naturally to that of the mirror”, writes the academic Maurice Émond. “All you need is a night background, a layer of tin and the glass becomes a mirror. The window sends us back to ourselves. And, through it, we question the world.
These geometric figures are like so many paintings hanging on our walls, still life of a windless morning, impressionist canvas under the mist, abstract when the night rises, Fauvist in the hallucination of sunrises and sunsets. Matt skies, salmon, periwinkle, metal, milk or flames, so many small aesthetic shocks produced by ever-changing fine arts.
Old friends tell me that windows have become the main activity of their daily life. They come and go from the kitchen to the bedroom and from the bedroom to the kitchen leaning on their canes, stopping at the perch from where they observe the planes in the sky, the traffic jams on the ground and the walkers leaning against the wind . They are at their windows in the twilight, when the soul of the houses lights up one by one, or in the clear dawns when the world begins again. “Every morning, I fully experience the simple pleasure of living,” says the eminent French sociologist Edgar Morin, who is celebrating his 101st birthday this summer. “My energy comes largely from this major force that is joy. And joy is often found in the window. With a coffee.
Could it be that these four-sided polygons become more important as we get older? Kind of like the birds seem to become more precious when life begins to tumble? A bird is presence in tendrils and songs. A window is presence in air and light.
Escape in a dream
Our windows are sometimes the place of existential tremors, of important decisions, the opportunity to draw up balance sheets, to decide in a setting where the clouds are galloping. “The windows are aerial, wind turbines, they accentuate the beauty, the idea of freedom but also the pain of confinement”, writes Kamel Daoud. “Standing people open doors and take trains or planes, the road, cycling or the open sea,” continues the writer, “seated people only open windows. That’s enough to change countries sometimes, especially when you’ve left or lost it. »
People standing open doors and take trains or planes, road, bike or sea. Seated people only open windows. That’s enough to change countries sometimes, especially when you’ve left or lost it.
Countries lost at the windows of memory and exile. It is Fati, a young Afghan, who grew up in the closed world of women in her society. She had only one window to escape in a dream. Or Lilya*, Ukrainian living in Sept-Îles, in the winds of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. But it’s not the gulf that she smells through the mosquito net. Only its Black Sea. Black with death and ashes. And the beaches of Odessa where, again last fall, she went kayaking on the curling waves. It was before the end of the world.
Windows of confinement. That of Daniel, who was a prisoner in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines for a long time. “Through the windows of my cell, I watched for seven years a small tree grow on a hillock. It was my only contact with real life. If you haven’t experienced confinement, you don’t know what freedom is. That of Gaëlle, a young Haitian playwright living in Port-au-Prince. “From my window, I can only see a wall. We have walled ourselves in to protect ourselves from gangs, chaos and killings. »
Windows. Also those of a pandemic, in the spring of 2020 in particular. Old ladies with undone buns, residents of CHSLDs, kiss loved ones through the window. These windows, still marked by their kisses of glass and Plexiglas, will follow us for a long time.
The century of windows
We live with our windows. “They are our invention, they are as old as our human time and were imagined by a sedentary lifestyle, writes Kamel Daoud again, and by the desire to capture light after having tamed horses, water and fire. We could trace the course of our lives like a series of windows sown in our lives like the pebbles of Tom Thumb. Which were our existences then. And who have brought us here.
Our recently designed houses are nothing more than vast bay windows in the middle of the trees that envelop them, all-windows sometimes inhabited without curtains, the latest fashion. And new commercial buildings are made of huge reflective surfaces of glass, incidentally leading to the death of millions of birds each year as a result of collisions.
And then, how can we forget, windows are also our screens! “The XXIe century will be the century of windows”, claims the writer Daoud. Computers, televisions, tablets, telephones, oblong figures of our selfies and our augmented realities, blue light of our existences in Zoom and other Teams.
The window is also waiting. The feverish expectation of the messenger carrying a parcel, a sum of money, a medicine. Waiting, feverish and sweet, to be loved. The anxious or impatient wait of someone who is late, who does not arrive.
Waiting for my father on his way home from work, often behind the window of the living room on rue Beaubien, a way my mother had found to make our little ogre appetites wait. When the Chevrolet showed up, it was the exultation. I can still see her, my mother, waving her hand in the window of our departures until we were removed from her gaze, each time a little tearing away that mingled with our joys.
Sometimes I still greet them both in the window, my father and my mother, in whatever eternity they find themselves.
The rain has not stopped. Outside life is hectic. The windscreen wipers sweep the windshields madly. A delivery man delivers on the run. In the distance, my old rusty freighters veil themselves, reveal themselves according to the showers. Me, inside, I’m in the front row. All at my window.
* Fictitious name