Explore "Windows" by Charles Pierre Baudelaire on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
He who looks in through an open window never sees so many / things as he who looks at a shut window. There is nothing more / profound, more mysterious, more fertile, more gloomy, or more / dazzling, than a window lighted by a candle. What we can see / in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on / behind the panes of a window. In that dark or luminous hollow, / life lives, life dreams, life suffers.
Across the waves of roofs, I can see a woman of middle age, / wrinkled, poor, who is always leaning over something, and who / never goes out. Out of her face, out of her dress, out of her / attitude, out of nothing almost, I have made up the woman's / story, and sometimes I say it over to myself with tears.
If it had been a poor old man, I could have made up his just as / easily.
And I go to bed, proud of having lived and suffered in others.
Perhaps you will say to me: "Are you sure that it is the real / story? " What does it matter, what does any reality outside of / myself matter, if it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, / and what I am?