Lights

Inside and out. Clock, bed, lamp. Fireflies. Lights in the dark of night.

I think of Pirandello’s story of the light across the way, the story of a solitary man fascinated by the scene he saw in the house across the way where in the evening when light enveloped the family seated around a table eating supper he might feel as if he were part of what he saw although he was careful not to be seen himself.  

At night I look out my unshuttered window and across the valley I can see street lights and perhaps the pinprick gleam of a window. I cannot see the life that goes on behind that window, that of those invisible inhabitants. I can only imagine it. In Holland, and often in America, windows are open to the gaze of passersby. In Italy there are shutters, tightly drawn to keep out some imagined spirit, or perhaps a peeping tom, separating private life from the public gaze. I am too far away here in the country, too isolated, for others to see what goes on within the thick stone walls of my house, even though there are open windows.

But there are also lights inside with stories of their own. Clock, bed, lamp. A small blue light tells me where to raise or lower the mattress on my bed. A small red light is where to turn on or off the reading lamp. Over to one side, a small blue light says my hearing aids are being charged. The general glow is that of the clock and as I lie in bed it will let me know that it is not yet time to rise or to go to sleep. That I can do my exercises before getting up. Or that I can go back to following the archaeologist Athos as he teaches the small Jewish boy he had saved about paleolithic times and classic cultures. Together they survived the war in Greece and Crete. Then there’s my latest NYR describing the exhibition at the Met of Sienese art and Duccio. The author had obviously fallen in love with the gold and sumptuous textures depicted in the icons. There is another blue light from somewhere under the bed, useful when I have to get up at night.  In the window there’s the reflection of a light from the room upstairs that tells me my son is still working at his computer.

And then there are other lights – night-time lights whose life is brief. It is warm outside, my clock says it is ten o’clock and intermittent flashes move in the dark through the outdoor spaces around the house.  Fireflies signalling their availability leave traces of their flight as they go past my window, putting to shame the stars. Or if I go out I can see them, countless jewels in the impenetrable velvet black of the woods. Tolkien’s fairy lights. By eleven o’clock they have disappeared. And it is again simply night with the much smaller sparks of the stars, moving ever so slowly across the pallid night-time sky.