once is good, twice is better

The most beautiful aspect of the dark season is that the cities are transformed into giant aquaria: you go through dark streets and can stare through the glass into the windows of lit kitchens and living rooms and watch the people as they swim back and forth surrounded by their furniture. It always seems like you are doing something, which is a little bit prohibited. I love that.

The most beautiful of all aquarium-streets of Hamburg is the Isestraße. Left and right of the Isestraße are wall to wall multistory apartment houses in Wilhelminian style, in the houses are rich old historic apartments, in the apartments live well-earning people. In the middle of the Isestraße runs an iron bridge, on the bridge runs every five minutes the elevated railway. If on a November or January dark late afternoon you travel with the elevated train through the Isestraße at supper time, while traveling past you can look in the dinner plate of the inhabitants of the Isestrasse - which from a distance are as big as dollhouses: in the kitchens or dining rooms couples and families sit at massive tables under stucco ceilings; above them hang candelabra or other lamps which were so expensive that they are called not simply lights, but 'luminous objects'. The luminous objects emit a warm golden glow. The warm golden glow has the strange effect that of the people which are illuminated by this glow one cannot even imagine that they cheat on their partners, abuse their children, blaspheme their colleagues, drink too much , or get intestinal flu.

The inhabitants of the Isestrasse have so little against the fact that one looks into their homes as the Calvinism-oriented inhabitants of the Netherlands, where large at-ground-level street-facing curtain-free windows deliver the message: 'We have nothing to hide'. Only that the inhabitants of the Isestrasse maybe go one step further: 'We have something to show'. Luminous objects, for example.

I grew up in a suburb where in front of each window were hanging curtains and quite many neighborhood residents were living in the cold glow of white neon tubes or, if they were very very hard on it, in the almost-frosty glow of purple translucent neon lights. In this light appeared, reasonably veiled by curtains, all sort of things: murder, intrigue, depravity. My parents had a kitchen curtain, however in the living room behind it many small cozy lamps lit my happy childhood. Still, every time I traveled through the Isestraße as a teenager, I thought: "When I grow up, I also want to live behind such a curtain-less window, where you enjoy to look and to let look."

Later I moved out and I lived in my own apartments. After each move, I have made the street test. I switched on the lights in the rooms which faced the street. I went outside. I stood on the street; the higher we lived the farther away from our house I had to stand in order to be able to see what I wanted to see. I imagined that I was not I and my apartment was not mine. Then I watched myself in the window, verifying.

Yes, I probably have a screw loose. What I saw never reached the approximate standard of the Isestrasse, but mostly I was reasonably satisfied, sometimes even quite happy. Then I went back inside.