The Lighted Window: Evening Walks Remembered
DPeter Davidson (Bodleian, £25) O we all have in our minds a consoling memory of ‘the cosiest sight of our lives’? For me, it was a friend’s lamplit thatched cottage, glimpsed through the January dusk after a rainy walk, luring us home for tea and crumpets. This book is all like that, a whimsical meditation on lamplit windows in art and literature. It’s astonishing how much there is, from Thomas Hardy to Alan Hollinghurst, Proust to Virginia Woolf, Samuel Palmer to the Japanese artist Kawase Hasui.
The author is a senior research fellow at Campion Hall, Oxford, and loves nothing more than tramping the streets of his favourite cities and hillsides at dusk, glimpsing cedar panelling in candlelit rooms and lamps turned on in distant windows. The book is lavishly illustrated with works of art to warm the soul. Not that all lamplit rooms in art are cosy— the house in Magritte’s L’heureux donateur, seen through the sinister reverse-silhouette of a man in a bowler hat, is strangely chilling, as is the bland, lit-up hotel room in Hopper’s Rooms for Tourists,
1945, as observed by a transient driver, suggesting rootlessness.
By definition, these pictures are painted from without, highlighting the sense of exclusion and longing. James Lynch’s illustration for Wind in the Willows,
of Rat and Mole darting down a snowy lamplit street, is haunting in its yearning. In Wuthering Heights, ‘the warmth of the candlelit rooms’ is set against ‘the violence of the weather scouring the haunted landscape outside’. The author’s prose reminded me of W. G. Sebald’s in the way he weaves in his own wanderings. This is an art-history and Englishliterature lesson rolled into one, best enjoyed in the glow of your own bedside lamp, ideally with a storm raging outside. Ysenda Maxtone Graham