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Right now, if I dared, I would climb to the roof again, and I would sit with my feet over the edge and crane forward and do crazy things just because I could. Then maybe my neighbors would mistake the point of my philosophy and lock me up; would sympathize with my fancies as did Sir Toby and Maria with Malvolio. If one is to escape bread and water in the basement, one’s opinions on such slight things as garters and roofs must be kept dark. Be a freethinker, if you will, on the devil, the deep sea, and the sunrise, but repress yourself in the trifles.

I like flat roofs. There is in my town a public library on the top story of a tall building, and on my way home at night I often stop to read a bit before its windows. When my eyes leave my book and wander to the view of the roofs, I fancy that the giant hands of a phrenologist are feeling the buildings which are the bumps of the city. And listening, I seem to hear his dictum “Vanity”; for below is the market of fashion. The world has sunk to ankle height. I sit on the shoulders of the world, above the tar-and-gravel scum of the city. And at my back are the books–the past, all that has been, the manners of dress and thought–they too peeping aslant through these windows. Soon it will be dark and this day also will be done and burn its ceremonial candles; and the roar from the pavement will be the roar of yesterday.

Astronomy would have come much later if it had not been for the flat roofs of the Orient and its glistening nights. In the cloudy North, where the roofs were thatched or peaked, the philosophers slept indoors tucked to the chin. But where the nights were hot, men, banished from sleep, watched the rising of the stars that they might point the hours. They studied the recurrence of the star patterns until they knew when to look for their reappearance. It was under a cloudless, breathless sky that the constellations were named and their measures and orbits allotted. On the flat roof of some Babylonian temple of Bel came into life astrology, “foolish daughter of a wise mother,” that was to bind the eyes of the world for nearly two thousand years, the most enduring and the strongest of superstitions. It was on these roofs, too, that the planets were first maligned as wanderers, celestial tramps; and this gossip continued until recent years when at last it appeared that they are bodies of regular and irreproachable habits, eccentric in appearance only, doing a cosmic beat with a time-clock at each end, which they have never failed to punch at the proper moment.

Somewhere, if I could but find it, must exist a diary of one of these ancient astronomers–and from it I quote in anticipation. “Early this night to my roof,” it runs, “the heavens being bare of clouds (coelo aperto). Set myself to measure the elevation of Sagittarius Alpha with my new astrolabe sent me by my friend and master, Hafiz, from out Arabia. Did this night compute the equation a=(Dx/2T)f(a, b c T_3). Thus did I prove the variations of the ellipse and show Hassan Sabah to be the mule he is. Then rested, pacing my roof even to the rising of the morning star, which burned red above the Sultan’s turret. To bed, satisfied with this night.”

Northern literature has never taken the roof seriously. There have been many books written from the viewpoint of windows. The study window is usual. Then there is the college window and the Thrums window. Also there is a window viewpoint as yet scarcely expressed; that of the boy of Stevenson’s poems with his nose flattened against the glass–convalescence looking for sailormen with one leg. What is “Un Philosophe sous les Toits” but a garret and its prospect? But does Souvestre ever go up on the roof? He contents himself with opening his casement and feeding crumbs to the birds. Not once does he climb out and scramble around the mansard. On wintry nights neither his legs nor thoughts join the windy devils that play tempest overhead. Then again, from Westminster bridges, from country lanes, from crowded streets, from ships at sea, and mountain tops have sonnets been thrown to the moon; not once from the roof.