Murnane Gerald - A Million Windows

Every one of us in this remote series of rooms would have fallen in love with more than a few fictional female personages. Leaving aside the question what is meant by the expression to fall in love , I can surely add that each of us finds himself equally liable to fall in love with the sort of personage who appears to him while he reads some or another fictional text or the sort of personage who appears to him from out of the space between fictional texts and whom he then seeks to have as a personage in a text of his own making. One of us, so I happened to learn recently while we two alone were drinking late — one of us had, nearly thirty years ago, the experience of falling in love with an entity, so to call her, who was both an actual female person, one of the sumless inhabitants of the spaces between fictional texts, and also a seeming likeness, if not the embodiment, of a personage who had first appeared to him nearly ten years before while he was reading a work of non-fiction first published nearly ten years before his birth, which personage was also a fictional personage in a work of fiction that he was writing at the time when he fell in love, so to speak, with the entity, so to call her.

I offer no apology to any sort of reader for any difficulties that he or she may have had with the previous sentence. Some of us in this topmost storey have been, or are still, entangled in such matters as cannot be reported in simple sentences. We are, during all our waking hours, rememberers of what we have read or have written, lamenters of what we have failed to read or write, projectors of what we hope still to read or to write, and breathing men, able, despite our many other concerns, to pace these corridors or to stroll through the grounds around this building or to travel whither we choose in the mostly level countryside beyond the grounds and no less likely than any other sort of man to fall in love with someone seen from a distance or met up with.

The man who is the chief character of this and several surrounding paragraphs read for the first time, early in his fifth decade, a book of non-fiction, so to call it, reporting, among many other matters, the death of a young woman, hardly more than a girl, who had leaped into a well on a remote farming estate comprising mostly level grassy countryside in the south-west of the Kingdom of Hungary more than thirty years before his birth. As is often the way with us frequenters of this upper corridor, the man, some ten years after he had first read the book mentioned, had set out to write a work of fiction in order not only to explain to himself why the image of a certain young woman, hardly more than a girl, was constantly in his mind but also to learn, if it were possible, what he seemed required to learn whenever the image seemed, as it often seemed, to importune him. He knew about the young woman, hardly more than a girl, who was mentioned in the first sentence of this paragraph and was mentioned in only three paragraphs of the book of non-fiction mentioned there, only that she had leaped into the well after having run during the night from the bedroom of the farm-overseer, her employer; that she had been unusually good-looking, although when her corpse had been dragged from the well and had been laid on the frozen soil nearby, her face had been disfigured by scratches caused, perhaps, by the buckets of the cowherds who had discovered her when they were watering their cattle at dawn; and that she had leaped barefoot into the well, having left her boots behind in her haste to leave the bedroom of the farm-overseer, her employer.

When he set out to write the work of fiction mentioned above, the man with the image constantly in his mind knew no more about the young woman mentioned above than what is reported about her in the previous sentence. He did not know, for example, what was the colour of her hair or what was her name. Of what might be called her history he knew only that she had left her boots in the bedroom of the farm-overseer, her employer. The man knew, however, a great deal about the image-person, so to call her. He knew that she was dark-haired; he knew her name; and he had learned, in somewhat the way that a person learns such matters in dreams, much about her history, as it might be called.

I ought, perhaps, to have repeated in each of the previous two sentences not that the chief character of these paragraphs knew certain matters but that he seemed to know them or that he claimed to know them. I wrote what I wrote after having recalled certain discussions between the chief character and myself, his narrator for the time being. We in this isolated corridor hold many views considered eccentric in other parts of the building, but even we find extreme and untenable some of the claims of the chief character. He claims to believe, for example, that the image-person, as I called her above, did not come into being as a result of his having read a certain three paragraphs in a certain book of non-fiction but that she pre-existed that event and that his taking-in with his eyes the text of the three paragraphs was merely the event that enabled him and her to meet up with one another. He even claims to believe that an image-person may be sometimes capable of influencing textual events, by which he seems to mean that his dark-haired image-person might not only have caused a certain three paragraphs of text to be written but might somehow have influenced him, nearly fifty years later, to become a reader of those paragraphs.

We, the colleagues, so to call us, of this speculator, so to call him, have for long agreed that the reading and the writing of texts, even of so-called non-fiction texts, are mysterious processes indeed. Some of us talk without awkwardness of an invisible world inhabited by the beings who appear to us while we read. We acknowledge that the invisible beings seem largely independent of us and even that they are able to affect our thinking and our behaviour, but the speculator, my chief character, would have us believe rather more than this.

At some time during the two and more years while he was writing the work of fiction last mentioned in the paragraph preceding the previous paragraph, the chief character, as I call him, who was already the author of several published books of fiction, was invited by some or another body to be one of a number of writer-guests at the annual conference of the body, which had as its stated aim the study of the literature of the chief character’s native country. He, the chief character, was about to draft a polite apology for his not attending before he learned that the conference was to take place in the island-state that was the southern-most state of his native country. He had never cared to travel, but he had long been curious about certain parts of the island-state, especially the district known as the Midlands, which he believed to comprise mostly level grassy countryside, and so he accepted the invitation. He travelled by boat to the island-state and then by car to the conference. He recalled afterwards that he had read a few pages from one of his published works, at a session of the conference when several writers thus read, but he recalled little else. He had been made uneasy by the strangeness of his surroundings and had been drunk or hung-over during most of the conference.

At one time while he was hung-over and was eating breakfast, or it may have been lunch, in the cafeteria where the other conference-attendees were also eating, he noticed a certain dark-haired young woman at a nearby table. He judged from the appearance of the young woman that one or both of her parents may have been Hungarian. Most of the persons in the cafeteria knew one another, if only by name, and he was able to learn from someone at his table the name of the young woman, which was not a Hungarian name, and that she was a member of the English Department at a university campus in a provincial city of his own state.