"The View from My Window"

By now you should have digested your Thanksgiving dinner, paid off the football pool, and are recovering from injuries incurred when your played touch football with your grandchildren. It is time to sit back, forget politics for the moment and contemplate the world outside your window. I hope this brief essay sets the mood.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“The View from My Window”

November 29, 2025

 

“She opened her curtains, and looked out toward the bit of road that lay in view, with

fields beyond the entrance-gates...Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she

felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance.”

                                                                                                                                George Eliot (1819-1880)

                                                                                                                                Middlemarch, 1871

 

Having lived in two apartments and six houses over sixty-one years of marriage, my wife and I have looked out at the carcass of a butchered deer from our first apartment in Durham, New Hampshire, to watching our Chocolate Lab “Bundle” chase her tail across the lawn in Greenwich, to observing flights of marsh birds from our home in Old Lyme. Now, for the past (almost) ten years, our sight is of the comings and goings at Essex Meadows, a view of a parking lot and distant hills, framed by a nearby oak tree. 

 

It is life we witness, (or in the case of the deer, what was once life became sustenance for the hunter and his family). What better vista than a window can there be to see life in all its variety. Who can forget Jimmy Stewart in the Alfred Hitchcock movie “Rear Window” where his curiosity solved a crime but almost became his demise. Nevertheless, I empathize with the Turkish playwright Mehmet Murat ildan, or at least with the quote attributed to him: “Your desire to be near to a window is your desire to be close to life.” 

 

Of all the places we have lived, the scene from our windows in Old Lyme was the most spectacular, but also the most serene. We looked across the Connecticut River to Old Saybrook, a mile or so distant. On the far side of the river we could see, but not hear, power boats. Nearby were tidal marshes that surrounded our dock, marshes that teem with life, nature’s urban centers. Osprey swept to and fro, as they fed on menhaden that thrive in the marsh rivers that separated us from Great Island. And nothing could compete with the beauty of a crimson sun sinking below the horizon across the River – its rays reaching out above the houses and trees in Old Saybrook – an omen of “sailors delight” for the next day.

 

Today, our view is quite different. But all windows unlock a lookout on a world of wonder, as Hannah Sheldon-Dean inferred in her 2023 children’s book, Windows to the Wonders of the World. It is life we witness, from the budding of plants in the spring, to birds welcoming a summer morning with song, to squirrels putting away food for the winter to come. Before we arise each morning crews are on the job, making our lives more pleasant. Early on a few dogs are walked by residents, or is it the other way around? These are people we know, people we care about and who care about us. “Set wide the window,” wrote Edith Wharton in Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse, “let me drink the day.” And so we do.   

"Rebecca," Daphne Du Maurier

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Burrowing into Books

“Rebecca,” Daphne Du Maurier

November 28, 2020

 

“I can close my eyes now, and look back on it, and see myself as I must have

been, standing on the threshold of the house, a slim awkward figure in my

stockinette dress, clutching in my sticky hands a pair of gauntlet gloves.”

                                                                                                The narrator thinks back on her arrival at Manderley

                                                                                                Rebecca, 1938

                                                                                                Daphne Du Maurier (1907-1989) 

 

Rebecca, among the most famous book titles, opens with one of fiction’s most recognized sentences: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Two years after publication, Alfred Hitchcock directed the Academy Award film starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier. In 2020, Ben Wheatley directed a new version, with Lily James and Arnie Hammer. While Hitchcock does a better job in portraying the dark mood of the story, neither, in my opinion, captures the novel’s full range.

 

Daphne Du Maurier wrote historical novels. She was a master of creating an atmosphere of dark moods and mysterious characters. Born in London, she spent much of her life in Cornwall. Novels like Jamaica Inn, Frenchman’s Creek, The King’s General and My Cousin Rachel were set in England’s west country. Manderley, Max de Winter’s home, is a large estate on the rocky coast of Cornwall; the time is the 1920s. 

 

The story is told through a narrator, whose name we are never told, though Max de Winter tells her, “You have a very lovely and unusual name.” When we meet her, she is a paid companion to a wealthy, overbearing American, Mrs. Van Hopper – “…her short body ill-balanced upon tottering high heels, her fussy, frilly blouse a complement to her large bosom and swinging hips…”. They are staying in Monte Carlo in late winter. While the narrator is never described, we are led to understand she is English, about twenty years old, comely not beautiful, innocent not worldly – the antithesis of Rebecca, which is what attracts Mr. de Winter. He is a widower; his wife Rebecca having died the previous May. He is “tall and slim, with dark hair,” wealthy, aristocratic, in his early forties.

 

The dead Rebecca hovers over the novel, like a dark cloud. She obsesses the narrator who has become the new Mrs. De Winter. Rebecca was tall, clever, fond of sport, “a very lovely creature…full of life.” Mrs. Danvers, formerly her childhood nurse, is now housekeeper at Manderley. We first meet her through the eyes of the narrator: “Someone advanced through the sea of faces, someone tall and gaunt, dressed in deep black, whose prominent cheek-bones and great hollow eyes gave her a skull’s face, parchment-white, set on a skeleton’s frame.” The ghost of Rebecca, a deceitful phantasm, hovers over the large, isolated estate, made real through the devious intrigues of Mrs. Danvers.

 

Neither movie ends as does the book. Movies are a visual, but passive, art form, where the eye works and the mind can nap. Books require concentration and are most effective when the reader employs his or her imagination, guided by the author. Rebecca’s last sentence, as Max and the narrator drive home to Manderley: “And the ashes blew toward us with the salt wind from the sea.” Not the end a movie requires, but perfect for this story; you will be captivated by Ms. Du Maurier’s creative genius. I will say no more.