Summary
"The Open Window" is the fifteenth poem in Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night. It tells the story of "an elderly writer," who is accustomed to writing in a very specific way (1). He first writes "THE END" on a piece of paper, then places pages over this final page so as to obscure the ending (1). Only after doing so, with more refinement in winter and more fervor in summer, is he able to construct a story that leads to the ending he supplied at the very beginning. He is reliant on nature and does not even keep clocks in his study, allowing the light to tell him what time it is. One summer day, however, a wind blows in through an open window and unexpectedly stirs his pages. He realizes then that this abruptness and unexpectedness is exactly what he needs in his writing, and as the poem ends, the writer sits on the floor of his study, watching the wind mix his pages with "the end among them" (11).
Analysis
Like the other short prose poems in the collection, "The Open Window" introduces readers indirectly to a spiritual and philosophical lesson. Rather than being about opening one's self to the experiences of uncertainty and transgression (like "Utopia" and "Forbidden Music," respectively), however, "The Open Window" seeks to convey information and advice about how to live. Here, as elsewhere in the collection, the aesthetic exercise of writing is set up as a parallel to the process of living. Our lives, like the writer's stories, have a definite end from their very beginning, though it is obscured by the substance of our lives to come. In winter, we are more deliberate and careful with life, like the writer, and in summer, we feel more free as the world around us falls into blossom and activity.
The writer's realization in the poem, then, is an allegory for Glück's own awakening or enlightenment regarding the proper way to live. Just as the writer learns to accept the uncertainty of the wind, which scatters his pages and perhaps even moves the end to a place before he wanted it, so too must we learn to throw ourselves fully into life and roll with the punches that chance and nature throw at us. This, however, flies in the face of what we are told by authority figures—that is, that we should plan and deliberately prepare for what is to come. Still, it is no accident that this realization only occurs in hindsight and old age to Glück, as well as in old age to the "elderly writer" of the poem. Only when faced with the immanence of something like death is one able to fully understand the necessity of living boldly and freely. This is also why slippage occurs between the proper, capitalized END of the writer's work and the lowercase "end" of the poem's conclusion. Death, again, is as much of an aesthetic question as writing a novel, and the proper answer can perhaps only be found when it is too late, when one lies on the "cold floor" as in a coffin (10).
