truly were, and in that captured moment perceive the terror I escaped, the full depth of a loss that was never mine.
I learned a great deal about Miss Channing the afternoon I read her father’s book. I learned about her father too: the fact that he’d been born into a privileged Massachusetts family, educated at Harvard College, and worked as a journalist in Boston during the years following his graduation. At twenty-three he’d married the former Julia Mason Rockbridge, also from a distinguished New England family. The two had taken up residence on Marlborough Street, near Boston Common, and in 1904 had a daughter, Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing. After that Mr. Channing continued to work for the Boston Globe , while his wife performed the usual functions of an upper-class woman of that time. Then, in the fall of 1908, Julia Channing fell ill. She lingered for some weeks, but finally died in January 1909, leaving four-year-old Elizabeth entirely to her father’s care.
More than anything, A View from the Window is a day-to-day record of the years Miss Channing lived and traveled with her father, a period during which they’d never actually had a fixed abode of any and, nor any permanent attachments, save for each other. The purpose of such a rootless life, Mr. Channing’s purpose in insisting upon it, is revealed in the opening paragraphs of his narrative:
After my wife’s death, to stay in Boston seemed doom to me. I walked about our house on Marlborough Street, gazing at the many luxuries she had acquired over the years, the velvet curtains, the Tiffany lamp, and a host of other appendages that, like Julia, were elegant in their way, but for which I could no longer feel any enduring affection. And so I decided to move on, to live in the world at large, to acquaint my daughter Libby with its most spacious and inaccessible climes .
As to my reasoning in this matter, I have never hidden it, nor wished to hide it. I chose to educate my daughter as I saw fit. And with what purpose in mind? For none other than that she should live a life freed from the constrictive influence of any particular village or nation, nor ever be bound by the false constraints of custom, ideology, or blood .
And yet, despite its grandly stated purpose, A View from the Window remained essentially a travelogue, though one that detailed not only sights and sounds and historical backgrounds, but the life Miss Channing and her father had lived as together they’d roamed the world.
It had been a vagabond life, the book made clear, a life lived continually in transit, with nothing to give it direction save for Mr. Channing’s furious determination to teach his daughter his own unique philosophy of life, relentlessly driving it home by escorting young Libby, as he called her, to bizarre and tragic sites, locations he’d selected for the lessons he planned to teach.
Reading that philosophy on the bluff that afternoon, I felt myself utterly swept away by a view of life so different from my father’s, from the governing assumptions of Chatham and of Chatham School, from any way of seeing things I’d ever encountered before, that I felt as if I’d suddenly entered a new galaxy, where, according to Mr. Channing, there should be “no rules for the rule of life,” nor any hindrance whatsoever to a man’s unbridled passions.
It was a world directly opposite to the one I’d been taught to revere, everything reversed or turned topsy-turvy. Self-control became a form of slavery, vows and contracts mere contrivances to subdue the spirit, the moral law no more absolute than a passing fad. More than anything, it was a world in which even the darkest evils were given a strange and somber dignity:
We took a boat from Sorrento, and disembarked a short time later at Marina Grande, on the eastern coast of Capri. The town was festive and welcoming, and Libby took great delight in its scents and in the winding labyrinth of its streets, skipping playfully ahead
I learned a great deal about Miss Channing the afternoon I read her father’s book. I learned about her father too: the fact that he’d been born into a privileged Massachusetts family, educated at Harvard College, and worked as a journalist in Boston during the years following his graduation. At twenty-three he’d married the former Julia Mason Rockbridge, also from a distinguished New England family. The two had taken up residence on Marlborough Street, near Boston Common, and in 1904 had a daughter, Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing. After that Mr. Channing continued to work for the Boston Globe , while his wife performed the usual functions of an upper-class woman of that time. Then, in the fall of 1908, Julia Channing fell ill. She lingered for some weeks, but finally died in January 1909, leaving four-year-old Elizabeth entirely to her father’s care.
More than anything, A View from the Window is a day-to-day record of the years Miss Channing lived and traveled with her father, a period during which they’d never actually had a fixed abode of any and, nor any permanent attachments, save for each other. The purpose of such a rootless life, Mr. Channing’s purpose in insisting upon it, is revealed in the opening paragraphs of his narrative:
After my wife’s death, to stay in Boston seemed doom to me. I walked about our house on Marlborough Street, gazing at the many luxuries she had acquired over the years, the velvet curtains, the Tiffany lamp, and a host of other appendages that, like Julia, were elegant in their way, but for which I could no longer feel any enduring affection. And so I decided to move on, to live in the world at large, to acquaint my daughter Libby with its most spacious and inaccessible climes .
As to my reasoning in this matter, I have never hidden it, nor wished to hide it. I chose to educate my daughter as I saw fit. And with what purpose in mind? For none other than that she should live a life freed from the constrictive influence of any particular village or nation, nor ever be bound by the false constraints of custom, ideology, or blood .
And yet, despite its grandly stated purpose, A View from the Window remained essentially a travelogue, though one that detailed not only sights and sounds and historical backgrounds, but the life Miss Channing and her father had lived as together they’d roamed the world.
It had been a vagabond life, the book made clear, a life lived continually in transit, with nothing to give it direction save for Mr. Channing’s furious determination to teach his daughter his own unique philosophy of life, relentlessly driving it home by escorting young Libby, as he called her, to bizarre and tragic sites, locations he’d selected for the lessons he planned to teach.
Reading that philosophy on the bluff that afternoon, I felt myself utterly swept away by a view of life so different from my father’s, from the governing assumptions of Chatham and of Chatham School, from any way of seeing things I’d ever encountered before, that I felt as if I’d suddenly entered a new galaxy, where, according to Mr. Channing, there should be “no rules for the rule of life,” nor any hindrance whatsoever to a man’s unbridled passions.
It was a world directly opposite to the one I’d been taught to revere, everything reversed or turned topsy-turvy. Self-control became a form of slavery, vows and contracts mere contrivances to subdue the spirit, the moral law no more absolute than a passing fad. More than anything, it was a world in which even the darkest evils were given a strange and somber dignity:
We took a boat from Sorrento, and disembarked a short time later at Marina Grande, on the eastern coast of Capri. The town was festive and welcoming, and Libby took great delight in its scents and in the winding labyrinth of its streets, skipping playfully ahead
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