Outside, looking in

The Lighted Window: Evening Walks Remembered

By Peter Davidson

(Bodleian Library Publishing; 2021)

The homeward traveller sees a distant light in the gathering gloom; a stranger looks up to the bright unshuttered window; in a distant tower, the light from a sputtering candle betrays the scholar late at his books. That figure on the road, seeing the far-off glow – are they anticipating a warm homecoming or reeling from a lover’s rejection? The image of The Lighted Window can evoke so many feelings and memories: nostalgia … alienation … longing … relief, perhaps.

Davidson’s book does not sit squarely in one genre. It is a scholarly but readable art history, a travelogue and a meditation. There are images of paintings, engravings, photographs which feature lights in the night or at twilight and are described and interpreted brilliantly. The stories behind the artists and the aesthetics that they belong to are unfolded in an accessible way that doesn’t try to dazzle with learning. There is no lightweight research here, but expert knowledge shared with artfulness in rich and well-paced language. In short, it is a thing of beauty.

The visual arts include paintings both old masters and modern, engravings and watercolours from the Western tradition and from the East, featuring, for example, beautiful work by Kawase Hasui from the 1930s. Davidson effortlessly draws out themes from literature and quotes poetry. Always to follow and develop the themes, never for show. And he doesn’t confine himself to “high” art either. We are just as likely to encounter Sherlock Holmes or The Wind in the Willows as we are Proust or Milton.

The introduction is threaded onto a walk through an Oxford dusk, from library to lodgings, taking in the college and street scenes and opening up the rich associations that they bring. And other chapters are similarly paced through dark streets or fields while he walks and talks with friends. Other perambulations lead us through the streets of Ghent, the fields of Oxfordshire, a London night, Stockholm, New England etc. before returning home. Always alert, he points out to us the architecture, the glimpses of culture in lightened interiors, the clues of absence or decay that hint of the history of a place. As we read, he becomes a companion to savour, putting me in mind of the indigenous Australians who can “sing up the land”, as his words open up the artistic allusions and physical illusions of a half-lit scene.

The Lighted Window is also itself a window through which we can glimpse the richly cultured world of Davidson and his educated, artistic friends. Their evening walks through great cities – Oxford, London, New York, Prague, Paris – are seen through their eyes as they point out the architecture thrown into relief by the fading light, or they appreciate art works and decorative interiors open to view from the pavements of fashionable neighbourhoods, and the light of lamps or candles brings to mind visual rhymes with great paintings, 17^th century etchings and in turn songs and poems of homecoming or lost love by Schubert or Schiller.

But this breadth and depth of learning and aesthetic sensitivity is not displayed as something that distances the reader but is conveyed with feeling and warmth: the author’s enthusiasm gets the message across when perhaps very few of us would be familiar with the wide array of artists, musicians and writers quoted. The result is a book that will stay with me for a long time, an experience to be revisited and savoured. Thank you, Professor Davidson.