Window watching: Why Travellers are forever looking out of windows

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This was published 9 years ago

Window watching: Why Travellers are forever looking out of windows

With its mix of temptation and voyeurism, looking out of windows has always been one of the great pleasures of travel, says Brian Johnston.

By Brian Johnston
'To look out a window is to want to be somewhere else'.

'To look out a window is to want to be somewhere else'.Credit: Michael Mucci

My father did what I've always thought was a rather peculiar thing on the day I was born: he took a photo out the window of my hospital room. What makes it even more unusual is that the view was hardly glamorous. The photo shows an dirt alley in a shantytown, where a woman bends over a tub of washing, framed by rusted corrugated-iron roofs. It's a drab, brown study of casual poverty in 1960s Lagos, but rather wonderful from a personal perspective. How many people have their first glimpse of the outside world captured forever in a photo?

This must have been the first place I looked out a window, the first view I ever saw, albeit through gummed and uncomprehending baby's eyes. I've been looking out of windows ever since: trains and airplanes, hotels and ships' cabins. My desk has always been placed at a window, my gaze drawn away from work. My homes have always been chosen for their outlook. A view on to a neighbour's wall or a skyless urban street would be like dying a little with every glance and every passing day.

Of course, I don't remember my first view, immortalised by my father. But I recall some vivid childhood windows. One of my most potent early memories is regularly sitting in the dentist's chair as a child, wishing I was somewhere else. The view from the chair is imprinted on my mind: some red-tiled roofs, a tall chimneypot, a cedar tree, a patch of sky. Sometimes a raven sat on a branch and then flapped slowly beyond my field of vision as I moved my eyes, head stilled by the dentist's drill.

To look out a window is to want to be somewhere else. Many a traveller's urge to head beyond the horizon must have started with a gaze out a window along the length of a street, or at distant hills, and the wish that they were out there, beyond the room's confines. Windows beckon with the possibility of something more exciting: why else as schoolchildren do we stare out at the sky, yearning for the end-of-class bell?

"I'm hungry for a juicy life. I lean out my window at night and I can taste it out there, just waiting for me," writes Rosie, the teen dissatisfied with small-town life in Brigid Lowry's novel of youthful rebellion, Guitar Highway Rose. Travellers seem rather happy people, but I sometimes wonder if the urge to travel isn't fundamentally rooted in dissatisfaction with the here, the itching need to be somewhere else, the secret hope that somewhere better lies across the river or over the hill.

Writers have long put windows to good use as symbols of anticipation (Joyce's The Dubliners), freedom (Kafka's The Metamorphosis) and escape (Flaubert's Madam Bovary). Some people never do go beyond the window, like Emma Bovary, always imagining a life she never obtains. E.M. Foster's Lucy Honeychurch, on the other hand, is determined to have her room with a view in Florence, a quest both metaphorical and literal. You can live content with never seeing beyond an inner courtyard, or you can have your panorama of the Arno River. The characters in A Room with a View who appreciate rooms with views are passionate and in touch with their thoughts and desires, unlike poor inhibited Cecil Vyse, described as "a drawing room without a view… how dull!"

Travellers are forever looking out of windows. The world is out there in a tempting, tantalising explosion of possibilities beyond the glass. In Trapani on the west coast of Sicily, I once stayed in an otherwise ordinary hotel room with a balconied window overlooking the old town's main street. Handsome palazzi facades erupted in baroque columns and statuesque women, and the town hall at the end of the street was a pink marble glory. I watched by the window as locals strutted and fretted upon this fabulous stage: gossiping neighbours, girls in red hair ribbons slurping green ice-creams, gold-chained men with slicked-back hair. Sicilian conversation floated through the window, the exotic hum of something different. After a while, I was irresistibly drawn to be out among it.

Windows such as these provide the expected. Others startle with contrast. I could be sitting in the dining room of the wistfully colonial Windamere Hotel in Darjeeling, being served 1930s British food – watercress soup followed by chicken in sherry sauce. The curtains are chintz, ferns sprout in pots. I feel I'm in Bournemouth until I lift my eyes from the yellow tablecloth and look beyond the windows. Mist swirls through the trees, prayer flags flutter, the valley plunges away in tiered tea plantations. Snow covers the Himalayas.

I pass by a window and pause amid life's busyness at the vista beyond, and am reminded of the world's beauty. "The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the blue honey of the Mediterranean," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby. These are wonderful moments.

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But travellers don't just look out windows for the scenery. The act can connect you with your destination, too. Often in hotel rooms, when that feeling of silent emptiness takes over, I find myself wandering to the window and staring out at the people beyond. It reminds me that I'm not really alone. Even in the most foreign of locales, if I stare long enough, I'll find a connection: that fellow with his pushcart who looks like my uncle, that mother with her toothy smile, lovers enjoying a conjoined stroll under evening neon. The outward trappings of a strange city look outlandish, but the daily life of people in the street is ordinary and universal.

Yet while window-watching can connect you, it can also separate you. The pane of glass alone forms a physical barrier. Windows separate the inside and outside, the private and public, the us and them. Sit in a fancy hotel in Mumbai and look out at the whirligig of earthly horrors that is Indian poverty and you discover that window-watching can make you very uncomfortable. Slouch in a Mumbai taxi at a red traffic light and hear the tap, tap of a beggar on your side window: to look or not to look, to connect or ignore?

Looking into windows – rather than out – can also feel uncomfortably voyeuristic. The Dutch don't draw their curtains at night; you can look in as you walk along Amsterdam pavements and see big, homey kitchens decorated with blond-haired children and bowls of tulips. As with the infamous windows of the red light district, you feel you oughtn't look, but are compelled to tom-peep anyway. It may be harmless, but you never know. Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 movie Rear Window (or its Disturbia retelling in 2007) is all about watching and imagining other people's lives through windows, with unforseen consequences.

For the most part, window-watching is surely a pleasure. Certainly, you might see a murder being committed from your train window like Elspeth McGillicuddy in the Agatha Christie novel 4:50 from Paddington, but you're more likely to enjoy the passing scenery. Take the train from Chengdu to Kunming in southwest China and you're provided with a slideshow of wonders, thanks to innumerable tunnels that have you flashing from dark to light. You see a rolling mountainside dotted with ancestral graves. A man in blue standing at a tiny railway platform with a yellow flag. A braided river sliding under a bridge, mottled with sunlight. You think you could probably alight anywhere and it would be a pleasure. Windows beckon with possibilities.

Aeroplane windows bring another kind of pleasure. You aren't part of the landscape but high above it, an army commander looking at his map, a god surveying his creation. Kazakhstan is a brown rocky mystery of shadowy valleys and mud-brick villages, and I imagine being down there, trotting along on a mule through apricot orchards in an absurd fantasy I'm too timid ever to realise. At other times I peer down at rice paddies or mountains and know that's where I'm about to be, finally immersed in the view just seen from the window.

Flying into a alien city is a thrill, but the thought of finally being beyond the window brings a kind of fear, too. Still, the unknown beckons. There are few better moments in travel than when you stand by a window of a hotel room and take your first look at a city: strange, alluring, curious. You want to fall into it like Alice down her rabbit hole.

True, there are other windows to the world these days. Too many people spend too much time staring at the window of their mobile phone as the view of the real thing passes them by. I could open a window on my desktop and know all there is to know about the world. But it isn't the same as sticking my head out a real window, as pigeons flutter, the muezzin's call ululates and sun glints off glasses in the coffee shop below, where black-garbed ladies giggle as they crack pistachios and sip their apple tea.

Windows have always been an opening to imagination, adventure and escape. There's always possibilities beyond the window, quite simply because it isn't the same as in here. Spend time loitering by a window and your life is enriched. As Edith Wharton wrote: "Set wide the window. Let me drink the day."

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