Free A Million Windows by Gerald Murnane Page A

somewhat differently.

    At some time during every day, I like to walk in the grounds that I see often from my upstairs window but have hardly begun to explore. The reader should not suppose from my having used the word grounds just now what I supposed during the first years when I frequented this singular building. I used then to suppose that the extensive formal parks and lawns and lakes and flower-beds, together with the labyrinths of paths and walkways connecting them, would have ended abruptly in every direction, and at some considerable distance from the building, in a high fence or a wall or hedge, on the further side of which would have been the nearest paddocks of the mostly level grassy countryside that seems to surround building and grounds on all sides and seems to be crossed at long intervals by roads where sunlight flashes occasionally in the late afternoon from the windscreen of some or another car or truck too far away to be seen or heard, and seems to extend far beyond the low hills or the lines of trees on the horizon. In fact, I have never come across any such fence or wall or hedge. I mostly stroll without purpose in the grounds around this mansion, so to call it, but I have sometimes walked directly away from the building, wanting to learn how far I might travel while still feeling myself in sight of a few at least of the sumless windows behind me. Not only did I never come up against any seeming boundary, but I was never able to decide, at the furthest point of my excursion, whether the mostly level grass and the scattered trees around me were still part of the estate that included the tall house where I belonged for the time being or whether I had strayed across some unmarked borderinto the countryside that had always seemed, when I looked towards it from my upper window, beyond the reach of a person writing for hour after hour at a desk.
    I mostly stroll without purpose, as I wrote above, and yet I seem to be drawn often to one particular sort of place. In several level areas within sight of one or another wing of the house, so to call it, I find myself seemingly ensnared for the time being among a number of pebbled paths forming a series of concentric circles separated each from the other by a box hedge reaching no higher than my thighs. From an upper window of the nearest wing, the paths and the hedges between might appear as one of those carefully planned and tended mazes where persons become truly lost among dense green barriers higher than themselves and where they cry out to be led back to the outside world, so to call it. Never, on any path among the dwarf-hedges, have I ceased to know where I stood in relation to this towering building in the one direction and the mostly level and far-reaching countryside in the other. And yet, I have been sometimes able to experience, while I supposed myself trapped for the time being in a whorl of topiary even though in sight of safety – I have been sometimes able to experience what I suppose to be the pleasurable confusion of a certain sort of reader of a certain sort of fiction.
    Somewhere in both the first and the later edition of his book, the American scholar mentioned earlier uses the expression double-voicing to denote the technique by which the narrator of a work of fiction is able to seem to report a series of events whileat the same time seeming to report the thoughts and feelings of some or another character involved in the events. The technique has been used by numerous narrators, but the undiscerning reader of this narrative may still be in need of an example.
    Nick rubbed his eye. There was a big bump coming up. He would have a black eye, all right. It ached already. That son of a crutting brakeman.
    The four sentences and the exclamation above are part of some or another work of fiction by Ernest Hemingway. A person reading the sentences with alertness should hear, as it were, two voices, one voice being that of the narrator and the other