[The images in this post come from a 1557 edition of Historiae de gentibus septentrionalibus (Description of the Northern Peoples) by Olaus Magnus, Archbishop of Uppsala; Smithsonian Libraries via Internet Archive. You can visit a digital exhibition devoted to these particular monstrous fish at the University of Gronigen Library.]

November 7, 2024. I begin to perceive how much is a question of outlook.

For instance, just minutes ago tonight I sat down in my usual place on the sofa and looked out the window. It’s the only spot with any view beyond the bricks and windows opposite: I can see a corner of the courtyard wall, a strip and wedge of sky, and a slice of lit-up subway station platform where gleaming train cars come and go along the elevated tracks. It could be a pleasant view at night. But now the latest innovation in overhead lighting MTA-style has been hung in a cluster smack in my sightline, and the bulbs could not be more glaring: my eyes can’t help but recoil from them. Yet I’ve kept sitting down there for I don’t know how long, and squinted and felt annoyed for how many nights on end, so stubbornly have I been attached to that end of my sofa, all for the sake of a pleasure that’s gone.

True, it was taken from me, subtracted from the comforts of my home: which hurts. The gargantuan tangle of agencies and vendors that is anything government-run inclines towards lighting public spaces more and more badly (Lionel Shriver even makes this a plot point in The Motion of the Body Through Space, her novel about runners). Down the block the Boardwalk lights are too hideous to bear, and so bright they flood the beach right down to the surf; the little seabirds and the stars are gone, the darkness is gone with all its lusciousness. Admit that it was only a matter of time before I got affected by this trend, inside my home: I do. And mass victimization is present, no question, with a growing list of victims for proof. My name is down there. But can I honestly call foul, injury, or injustice, when the case bears more resemblance to running up against a fact of life? One of those facts of life in the big city? Either way, however bothered I’m made by the sight of those platform lights, allowing them to hurt my eyes night after night won’t make them go away any sooner.

Or I could become inured, as many sedentary people do. Habits are binding. Maybe, in clinging to my usual spot on the sofa, I followed an instinctive aim to blunt my senses against sheer duration until the lights outside stopped hurting, so I could stay in place. My mother’s daughter: that was her end of her old sofa too.

But then tonight, as I say, I sat down again. There were the blue-white glaring lights. Almost instantly I began to shift my posture so as to place them behind the bottom window sash, raised a few extra inches to the Indian Summer. Success brought moments of calm which made me relax and spoiled everything. A minute or two passed this way before words occurred to me, about a willing change in outlook. I stood up, got my laptop, and took it to the sofa’s other end. From which I face a fuller view of my piano, where one of Mendelssohn’s Venetian Boat Songs sits atop the music on the fold-down shelf. I see a bookcase, one of several, this is the tall one from my childhood; I see the box that holds my mother’s ashes housed amid her P.G. Wodehouse collection. My cat Petie curled up on my right side instead of my left, I listen to a CD of Angela Hewitt playing Mozart sonatas as I sit and type. I remain aware of a presence outside, something annoying, painful, cheap-natured, triumphant in its ugliness; I’m bothered by the way it hems me into the interior. I’d prefer to have all my comforts around me, including my narrow view onto dim local nights where silvery trains roar through like sea serpents.