Windows
By Charles Baudelaire
He who looks outside through a window open never sees as much as he who looks at a window closed. No deeper, more mysterious, more fertile, more obscure, more dazzling object exists than a window lit by a candle. What you can see in sunlight is always less interesting than what transpires behind a windowpane.
Life lives, life dreams, life suffers in that black or luminous hole.
Beyond the billowing rooftops, I notice a mature woman, already wrinkled, poor, always bent over something, and who never goes out. With her face, her clothing, her gestures, with almost nothing, I have refashioned that woman's history, or rather her legend, and sometimes I tell it to myself weeping.
If it had been a poor old man, I would have just as easily refashioned his as well.
And I go to bed, proud of having lived and suffered in others than myself.
Perhaps you will ask, "Are you sure that legend is the true one?" Does it matter what the reality located outside of me might be, if it has helped me to live, to feel that I am and what I am?
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