Consider the view from your window.

I don’t mean the window in your bedroom or your office or your kitchen or your parlor. You won’t find this room in your house. I mean the window in another room, the place where you sit in the gloom and read and sip tea or smoke a pipe, surrounded by your books and your bottles. On the shelves where there’s a little space between the heavy, cobwebbed volumes, you see dried flowers in leaded crystal and pewter dragons long ago changed to gold by some magic whisper, and you sit and watch the flame of a candle flicker and you consider the ultimate ends of things. Everybody has a room like that. They gave you the key to the door to that room with your first breath. Maybe you move into it with your last.  Continues….