Dublin transforms before my eyes in October. As I walk home from Trinity, I see familiar houses, but the rooms beyond the windows begin to light up. They begin to feel different from the daytime versions. Suddenly, the houses in Dublin are filled beyond their brick fronts, railings, steps, and tall sash windows. In one, a table is set. In another, a figure in a dark shirt crosses the room. One shows a plant near the glass, and a pot, forming a perfect silhouette. These fleeting glimpses of other people’s lives makes me feel as though I’ve invaded their privacy, despite my satisfaction in doing so.
Because the streets are usually so busy, I’m not likely to look into windows during the day. But when the sun starts to set and the lights start to glow, I find myself staring again. There’s nothing special about the objects I see, really. People like me often make small assumptions about the human figures they see, but lose interest when the person disappears. Rooms, in a way, become interesting because we can’t enter them. When we can only glimpse what the room contains, it makes us want to know more.
Edward Hopper captures the feeling of being separate from another person in a space, or from a space entirely. In ‘Night Windows’, Hopper places the viewer outside a building, looking into an apartment through the dark glass. The viewer observes an illuminated room where, in this case, a woman goes about her business, entirely unaware of the viewer’s presence. Hopper explores a relationship centered on intimacy and the sense of being observed. Brassaï worked through a related problem in his photographs of Paris at night, where electric lights illuminate the street, making people and windows newly visible after darkness had previously obscured them. Ordinary and daily routines continue in the background, the surface serving as a blockade.
The same pattern plays out in Dublin, where many of its Georgian houses were designed with facades whose size and window placement dictated the internal layout of the rooms. Today, those same windows hold completely different functions, from student bedrooms to rented flats, family kitchens, temporary apartments, and so on. Around Trinity, the city’s older structure sits beside signs of constant change. A blockade opens and closes, revealing and obscuring daily routines. A conversation takes place across the street, lit only by a lamp moving from one room to another. Someone leaves a window open, letting the sounds of their conversation drift down to the road — the viewer still unable to understand the words.
October brings a special kind of allure to lit windows. They capture the private methods of arranging chairs, books, plants, and lamps, and they show how rapidly a room becomes communicative even with nothing obvious on display. In a few months, I can learn a lot about a house and be reminded of things I’d forgotten. Then, with the November wind I turn my head, and the image of that house is replaced by another more interesting one a block away. By morning, the windows will be ordinary again, and a collision of rooms will return to their rightful owners.
