A Room with a View

Chronic illness and the daydream

'Convalescent, Mme Lepère', Auguste-Louis Lepère, 1892

Why does a prisoner, on entering his cell for the first time, go straight to the barred window to look outside? The window is an aperture to a world he can no longer access, to the freedom he has foregone. But is also a gateway to daydreams, to possibility: it looks to the future.

In his book The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard observes that the house is the primary site of daydreaming, and ‘by the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separates us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future’. The window, for our imaginary inmate, is the sight at which that daydreaming is most fully realised because it marries the locus in which he is trapped with the untrammelled realms of possibility that consciousness admits.

Auguste-Louis Lepère’s painting, Convalescent, Mme Lepère, depicts a similar collapsing of the boundary between interior space and the world conjured up by the imagination: Mme Lepère sits in an armchair which melts into the landscape beside a remote and tranquil estuary. The estuary scene has been envisioned by a bored and sickly convalescent seeking to escape the here and now. It is decorated in dream-like pastels of pinks and blues which Mme Lepère, clad in a pallid frock, does not look upon, but past, beyond the scope of the frame, with eyes that have that otherworldly quality of reverie.

No wonder, then, that Emily Dickinson, a famous recluse who wrote from the confines of her bedroom, would begin her poem ‘I dwell in Possibility’, in typical Bachelardian fashion, with metaphors of domestic space (and portals in particular) as points of departure for the imagination:

I dwell in Possibility –

A fairer House than Prose –

More numerous of Windows –

Superior – for Doors –

The language encodes the in/out, here/there duality, ‘dwell’ acting as the static opposite of the protean ‘Possibility’ – which is capitalised, rather like the Romantics did with Fancy (the imagination) to indicate a higher plane of consciousness. But she does not dwell with, but in – she has emancipated herself from embodied existence, the dashes acting as wings that dislodge her from prosaic reality and propel her into a higher realm of poetic consciousness.

This yoking – or rather, the replacing – of (metaphorical) domestic trappings with the expansive world of the imagination continues as we move perspectivally beyond the roof and into the heavens:

Of Chambers as the Cedars –

Impregnable of eye –

And for an everlasting Roof

The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –

For Occupation – This –

The spreading wide my narrow Hands

To gather Paradise –

No eye but the ‘inward eye’ of Wordsworth can break through to this impregnable vision of universal possibility; in fact, to see clearly might be to risk collapsing the daydream altogether. And it is not eyes, but hands through which Dickinson can envelop the universe in a Blakean merging of the atomic and the cosmic, where one can ‘Hold infinity in the palm of your hand’.

This poem is in dialogue with the Romantic poets writing half a century previously and sometimes scores a neat victory over them. Keats cannot sustain himself in the fantastical, transcendent world of the nightingale: ‘Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.’ The beautiful, entrancing voice of the nightingale flees the scene like a man on the run: ‘Past the near meadows, over the still stream, / Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep / In the next valley-glades’.

But where Keats returns to reality, Dickinson soars away from it and stays there, gathering paradise as she goes.

It’s interesting to note that in 1865 Dickinson underwent treatment for eye pain, which had irritated her for years. She was ordered by her doctor not to read, and she stayed in a room with dimmed light. During this time, she wrote, ‘I work in my prison, and make Guests [poems] for myself’. Although it is believed that she wrote ‘I dwell in Possibility’ a few years later in 1862, there nonetheless seems to be a symmetry with her own life worth pointing out.

So, the convict and the convalescent have much in common with the poet: dislodged from the normal patterns of time and space, concentrated physically in one room with a need for imaginative escape. The creative power, at least for the Romantic poet, the convict and the convalescent, comes from transmuting the physical world into the visionary world of possibility, reordering one’s reality so that one can feel the future supplanting the present.

Every day I watch my neighbour walk past my window. He is 100 years old. He is returning from Golders Green where he has been to the gym and picked up some shopping from Sainsbury’s. I have to contend with the fact that I am, aged 35, considerably more limited than a centenarian.

And so, when my neighbour has shuffled off to his flat, and I am again gazing out the window at a view I have come to know so well, my daydreams take me to Italy, to a piazza in Florence or Assisi where I am drinking a cappuccino and smoking a Camel Blue. If, when, this becomes a reality, nothing is ever going to taste so good.