image of a white-haired man looking out over a small lake; behind the man is a house of two or, perhaps, three storeys. I then recalled a certain expression on the face of a ragged boy of ten or twelve years. The boy and his two ragged men-companions had completed, moments before, the rape and murder of a young woman, hardly more than a girl, after they had met up with her in a clearing in a forest. Moments after I had seen the face of the ragged boy, he vomited.
I was about to ask the questions why am I able to call to mind only those two images from the many thousands of images that would have appeared to me while I watched the Swede’s films during the 1960s? Do those images have for me any seeming connection with the place that I call the visible world? And, if the images seem to have no such connection, what connection, if any, do they have with the place that I call the invisible world or, sometimes for convenience, my mind? First, however, I had better reassure the discerning reader that I am well aware of the many falsehoods in the previous paragraph – falsehoods that I allowed into the text for the sake of the undiscerning reader, who might have found tedious a strictly accurate account of what is reported there. I reported, accurately enough, that I had recalled an image of a white-haired man but thereafter I fell into everyday language, so to call it, such as probably caused many an undiscerning reader to see in mind images of an actual-seeming ragged boy and actual-seeming ragged men and to forget that what were, in fact, denoted were mental images, or memories, as some would call them, of images projected through film onto a screen fifty years before their recall. At the risk of trying the patience of the discerning reader, I shall add that much else denoted by my everyday language in the previous paragraph has no existence in the world where I sit writing these words. The image of a man looking out over a lake with a tall house behind him was an image of an image of a man pretending so to look. No young woman, hardly more than a girl, was raped and murdered. No ragged boy actually vomited. Even so, I have kept in mind for fifty years images of these nullities. As for the questions that I was about to ask when I began to write this paragraph, I can best answer them figuratively. If ever I should choose to locate those images and many others of their kind at one particular site, as the Swede, late in life, chose to locate the chief characters of his many films, then the site would be at the centre of some mental landscape of mostly level grassy countryside and would comprise a house of two or, perhaps, three storeys and who knows how many windows.
I would not brand as undiscerning any reader of the previous paragraph who might look forward to reading in this present paragraph what he or she would probably call a description of the house mentioned above. I would expect, however, that any such reader, after a little reflection, would agree that what he or she wanted from me was that I should report not the appearance of a particular house but the detail that first alerted me to the existence of the house in what I call the invisible world, which detail would surely have seemed likely to fufill some or another long-held hope or expectation of mine. I would expect also that any such reader, after having read my report, would see in mind just such a house as he or she had for long hoped or expected to see while reading some or another passage of fiction.
In the year when I became married, in the mid-1960s, I read the first volume of the autobiography of a male writer who was almost thirty years older than I and who had died fifteen years later after having been struck by a car when walking drunkenly across the street in a provincial city of this state. I remember my observing while I read his autobiography that the author used the present tense throughout the book and my deciding soon afterwards that I ought myself to use that tense throughout the work of fiction that I had been trying for several years to write. After having begun to write this paragraph, I remembered several details from my experience as a reader, nearly fifty years ago, of the autobiography mentioned, but the only one of those details that I was able to remember before I began to write the paragraph was my seeming to see dazzling points of light on a distant hillside during moments while I read that the author claimed to remember his having seen often as a child, while he watched from a balcony in the late afternoon, and when the light from the declining sun fell at a certain angle, what he called sumless distant windows like spots of golden oil.
Given that the book in my hands was an autobiography, I surely supposed, when I first read the report of the glowing widows, that the author himself had seen several times during his childhood just such windows as he claimed to have seen. Today, having read and written much during nearly fifty years since, I suppose no such thing. Today, I understand that so-called autobiography is only one of the least worthy varieties of fiction extant. Given that what I read was in the present tense, and recalling now how young I was at the time and how little I had read, I can hardly doubt that I supposed also, when I first read the report of the glowing windows, that what I was then experiencing as a reader was the nearest equivalent that I could hope to experience to whatever it was that the author would have experienced, nearly thirty years before my birth, when he sometimes saw from a balcony in the late afternoon reflected sunlight in distant windows. Today, having read and written and supposed much during nearly fifty years since, I suppose no such thing.
While I was reading the report of the richly lit distant windows, I would probably have counted myself fortunate to know the approximate location, in the world where I then sat reading, of the actual balcony where the author of the autobiography was reported to have watched often as a child and of the distant hillside where the windows were strangely lit. Earlier in the text, the author had named the street where he had lived during certain years of his childhood. I happened to know that same street and was even able to visualise, while I read, an approximation of the distant hillside where the windows had sometimes reflected the late sunlight. I suspect that I would have paused soon after I had read the passage in which the windows were compared to drops of golden oil and would have speculated as follows. Given that I know the very street where the autobiographer lived during certain years of his childhood, and given further that I am able to visualise, while I read, an approximation of the actual hillside that he sometimes saw in the distance, I am more fortunate than the many readers who do not know the street and are unable to visualise the hillside. I am more fortunate because I am able, if I choose, to visit nowadays the very street from which the autobiographer looked out sometimes at least twenty years before my birth, to wait in the street until a certain moment on a certain sort of late afternoon, and then to assess the aptness of the autobiographer’s comparing a number of distant windows to sumless spots of golden oil. Today, having read and written and speculated much during nearly fifty years since, I could never thus speculate.
Once, or it may have been more than once, during the mid-1940s, I travelled with my parents and my siblings by road from a large provincial city in the north of this state to a smaller city in the south-west. We stopped for our midday meal in a large city in the inner west of the state – the same city, as it happens, where the autobiographer, more than thirty years later, would be struck and killed while drunkenly crossing a street. Travel by road was far slower then than now, and we spent most of the afternoon travelling further towards the smaller city, our destination. When the sun was low in the sky, we were still crossing the extensive plains that occupy much of the south-west of this state. If this paragraph were part of an autobiography or of a conventional work of fiction, then I might well report at this point that I saw at least once, and far across the extensive plains mentioned, a sight that I surmised was a reflection of the light from the declining sun in one or more upper windows of a house of at least two storeys. I might even go on to report that my reading, twenty years later, a certain autobiographical passage in which distant windows are likened to spots of golden oil was in some way connected with my reporting, in the next-to-last paragraph of my first published work of fiction, that the chief character of that work, while travelling with his parents across the extensive plains mentioned, is enabled to see in mind certain details that he has previously been unable so to see. This present work being neither autobiography nor fiction of the same order as the work that I began to write, in the present tense, in the mid-1960s, I need report here only the detail first mentioned in the seventh paragraph of this present work. I need report here only that the window first mentioned in the first paragraph of this present work of fiction might have seemed, at the moment when it was first mentioned, as a distant window might have seemed on an extensive plain to a narrator of an autobiography or to a chief character of a work of fiction – might have
