Sometime in early November the daytime temperature in Dongbei dipped below freezing covering all of the windows in my apartment with a thin sheet of ice. The ice grew thicker each day until it overgrew the glass of the windows and froze each casement closed. For four months I have seen the world through ice. In daytime, this is a bright, brilliant place, for Dongbei skies are usually clear and cloudless. The sunlight shines through the windows refracting over the patterns made in the glass. These patterns grow in tiny florets and whorls and arabesques of icy foliage, as if the ice itself is alive and multiplying through something more than just the cold. It’s not easy to see through a frozen window, and less light comes in, but at night the ice crystals glitter in the moonshine, encrusting the glass with diamante sparkles.

In these icy months, I’ve been thinking not only about how I view the bright but distorted outside on the other side of the frozen glass, but also how we experience the distant but intimate world on the other side of the page of an unfinished novel. A novel in progress is like a series of frozen windows, a chain of necessary scenes. We may have a firm idea of the structure in each pane, but these structures grow and change. In the cold of night ideas harden and become crisp, but during the day they are thawed by sunlight, and when they refreeze the patterns change. When the pattern in one window grows, so too must the pattern in each of the other frames, and the novel, like the ice on the windows, is growing in countless directions all at the same time.

You can read a metaphor in a hundred different ways, and the same is true of many stories, but there is a story that I feel demonstrates this relationship between the writer and his work so completely. Gabriel Josipovici’s ‘Second Person Looking Out’ is a surreal tale in which the protagonist is visiting a house with seventeen rooms with three windows in each. In the story, each time a window is used, it moves, so the characters are constantly disarmed by their own viewpoint:

If you go from one room to another, he says, the head of the house, your host, may move a window fractionally along the wall or transplant it to another wall altogether, so that when you return to the first room you see another landscape outside, differently framed.

Josipovici’s story is haunting and confusing, and in so many ways, once you have spent a long time writing a text, viewing it from so many angles, through so many frames, the text also becomes confusing. But we continue. We continue because of the possibilities, for the pleasure of what the next window might hold, for the surprises waiting there, and the challenges. Not every window will be used, not every frame. Some will thaw completely, their patterns will dissipate to mere fog, while others will earn their permanence.

‘Second Person Looking Out’, despite its title, doesn’t just look out from the house with its seventeen rooms and shifting window frames, the protagonist is also journeying to and from the house upon a network of winding paths. The house itself seems to move, flirting with the viewer, and the reader:

First you may see a little bit of the house, then it disappears for several minutes, then you see another aspect of it, because the path is winding gradually round it. And when you finally reach it, because you are constantly seeing fragments of it and imagining it when you can’t see it, you’ve experienced it in a million forms, you’ve already lived in the house, whole dramas have occurred before you even reach it, centuries have elapsed and you are still as far away from it as ever.

This house, like the novel, is a world we must circle around in order to find the best viewpoint, the surest entrance, for not all of the routes into a work are created equal. This is a long game, but we must be willing to turn it in our minds, we must be willing to make the most of these moving windows, of their ice and its thaw. We must always be looking for the perfect view and the crispest pattern.

Gabriel Josipovici; ‘Second Person Looking Out; Heart’s Wings and Other Stories (Caracanet; 2010)