A man on a ladder looks through a roof opening. ![]() Yesterday I was on the roof with the tinman. He did not resemble the tinman of the “Wizard of Oz” or the flaming tinman of “Lavengro,” for he wore a derby hat, had a shiny seat, and smoked a ragged cigar. It was a flue he was fixing, a thing of metal for the gastronomic whiffs journeying from the kitchen to the upper airs. There was a vent through the roof with a cone on top to shed the rain. I watched him from the level cover of a second-story porch as he scrambled up the shingles. I admire men who can climb high places and stand upright and Maybe after all, it is just because I am so cowardly and dizzy that I have a liking for high places and especially for roofs. Although here my people have lived for thousands of years on the very rim of things, with the unimagined miles above them and the glitter of Orion on their windows, so little have I learned of these verities that I am frightened on my shed top and the grasses below make me crouch in terror. And yet to my fearful perceptions there may be pleasures that cannot exist for the accustomed Quite a little could be said about the creative power of gooseflesh. If Shakespeare had been a tinman he could not have felt the giddy height and grandeur of the Dover Cliffs; Ibsen could not have wrought the climbing of the steeple into the crisis and calamity of “The Master Builder”; TeufelsdrÖckh could not have uttered his extraordinary night thoughts above the town of Weissnichtwo; “Prometheus Bound” would have been impossible. Only one with at least a dram of dizziness could have conceived an “eagle-baffling mountain, black, wintry, dead, unmeasured.” In the days when we read Jules Verne, was not our chief pleasure found in his marvelous way of suspending us with swimming senses over some fearful abyss; wet and slippery crags maybe, and void and blackness before us and below; and then just to give full measure of fright, a sound of running water in the depths. Doesn’t it raise the hair? Could a tinman have written it? But even so, I would like to feel at home on my own roof and have a slippered familiarity with my slates and spouts. A chimney-sweep in the old days doubtless had an ugly occupation, and the fear of a Right now, if I dared, I would climb to the roof again, and I would sit with my feet over the edge and crane forward and do crazy things just because I could. Then maybe my neighbors would mistake the point of my philosophy and lock me up; would sympathize with my fancies as did Sir Toby and I like flat roofs. There is in my town a public library on the top story of a tall building, and on my way home at night I often stop to read a bit before its windows. When my eyes leave my book and wander to the view of the roofs, I fancy that the giant hands of a phrenologist are feeling the buildings which are the bumps of the city. And listening, I seem to hear his dictum “Vanity”; for below is the market of fashion. The world has sunk to ankle height. I sit on the shoulders of the world, above the tar-and-gravel scum of the city. And at my back are the books—the past, all that has been, the manners of dress and thought—they too peeping aslant through these windows. Soon it will be dark and this day also will be done and burn its ceremonial candles; and the roar from the pavement will be the roar of yesterday. Astronomy would have come much later if it had not been for the flat roofs of the Orient and its glistening nights. In the cloudy North, where the roofs were thatched or peaked, the philosophers slept indoors tucked to the chin. But where the nights were hot, men, banished from sleep, watched the Somewhere, if I could but find it, must exist a diary of one of these ancient astronomers—and from it I quote in anticipation. “Early this night to my roof,” it runs, “the heavens being bare of clouds (coelo aperto). Set myself to measure the elevation of Sagittarius Alpha with my new astrolabe sent me by my friend and master, Hafiz, from out Arabia. Did this night compute the equation a=Dx/2T f(a, b c T_3). Thus did I prove the variations of the ellipse and Northern literature has never taken the roof seriously. There have been many books written from the viewpoint of windows. The study window is usual. Then there is the college window and the Thrums window. Also there is a window viewpoint as yet scarcely expressed; that of the boy of Stevenson’s poems with his nose flattened against the glass—convalescence looking for sailormen with one leg. What is “Un Philosophe sous les Toits” but a garret and its prospect? But does Souvestre ever go up on the roof? He contents himself with opening his casement and feeding crumbs to the birds. Not once does he climb out and scramble around the mansard. On wintry nights neither his legs nor thoughts join the windy devils that play tempest overhead. Then again, from Westminster bridges, from country lanes, from crowded streets, from ships at sea, and mountain tops have sonnets been thrown to the moon; not once from the roof. Is not this neglect of the roof the chief reason why we Northerners fear the night? When darkness is concerned, the cowardice of our poetry is notorious. It skulks, so to speak, when beyond the glare of the ’Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world. Why is the night conceived as the time for the bogey to be abroad?—an … evil thing that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meager hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost That breaks his magic chains at curfew time. Why does not this slender, cerulean dame keep normal hours and get sleepy after dinner with the rest of us—and so to bed? Such a baneful thing is night, “hideous,” reeking with cold shivers and gloom, from which morning alone gives relief. Pack, clouds, away! and welcome, day! With night we banish sorrow. Day is jocund that stands on the misty mountain tops. But we cannot expect the night to be friendly and wag its tail when we slam against it our doors and, until lately, our windows. Naturally it takes to ghoulishness. It was in the South where the roofs are flat and men sleep as friends with the night that I get full of my subject as I write and a kind of rage comes over me as I think of the wrongs the roof has suffered. It is the only part of the house that has not kept pace with the times. To say that you have a good roof is taken as meaning that your roof is tight, that it keeps out the water, that it excels in those qualities in which it excelled equally three thousand years ago. What you ought to mean is that you have a roof that is flat and has things on it that make it livable, where you can walk, disport yourself, or sleep; a house-top view of your neighbors' affairs; an airy pleasance with a full sweep of stars; a place to listen of nights to the drone of the city; a place of observation, and if you are so inclined, of meditation. Everything but the roof has been improved. The basement has been coddled with electric lights until a coal hole is no longer an abode of mystery. Even the garret, that used to be but a dusty suburb of the house and lumber room for early Victorian furniture, has been plastered and strewn with servants' bedrooms. There was a garret once: somewhat misty now after these twenty years. It was not daubed to respectability with paint, nor was it furnished forth as bedrooms; Whither have the pirates fled? Maybe some rumor of the great change reached them in their fastnesses; and then in the light of early dawn, in single file they climbed the ladder, up through the scuttle. And straddling the ridgepole with daggers between their teeth, alas, they became dizzy and toppled down the steep shingles to the gutter, to be whirled away in the torrent of an April shower. Ah me! Had only the roof been flat! Then it would have been for them a reservation where they might have lived on and waited for the sound of children's feet to come again. Then when those feet had come and the old life had returned, then from aloft you would hear the old cry of Ship-ahoy, and you would know that at last your house had again slipped its moorings and was off to Madagascar or the Straits. Where shall we adventure, to-day that we’re afloat, Wary of the weather and steering by a star? Shall it be to Africa, asteering of the boat, To Providence, or Babylon, or off to Malabar? So a roof must be more than a cover. The roof of a boat, its deck, is arranged for occupation and is its Consider that the summer day has ended and that you are tired with its rush and heat. Up you must climb to your house-roof. On the rim of the sky is the blurred light from the steel furnaces at the city’s Alone upon the house-top to the North I turn and watch the lightnings in the sky. Is it fanciful to think that into the mind comes a little of the beauty of the older world when roofs were flat and men meditated under the stars and saw visions in the night? Once upon a time I crossed the city of Nuremberg after dark; the market cleared of all traces of its morning sale, the “SchÖner Brunnen” at its edge, the narrow defile leading to the citadel, the climb at the top. And then I came to an open parade above the town—“except the Schlosskirche Weathercock no biped stands so high.” The night had swept away all details of buildings. Nuremberg lay below like a dark etching, the centuries folded and creased in its obscurities. Then from some gaunt tower came a peal of bells, the hour maybe, and then an answering peal. “Thus stands the night,” they said; “thus stand the stars.” I was in the presence of Time and its black wings were brushing past me. What star was in the ascendant, I knew not. And yet in me I felt a throb that came by blind, circuitous ways from some far-off Chaldean temple, seven-storied in the night. In me was the blood of the star-gazer, my emotions ******* This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. |