Henri Rivière drew the Eiffel Tower from a high window on the Rue Rochechouart. The street drops away below, shopfronts and awnings and people the size of commas, and the tower stands far off in the haze, almost an afterthought. What the picture is really about is the looking: the height of the window, the slight vertigo, the whole city arranged in front of someone who has stopped working for a moment to take it in.
I think about it whenever I sit down to write and find myself looking out instead. The impulse is the same in both cases: the room is known and the world is not, and the window is where they meet. Most writing, I suspect, begins at a window, with someone looking at something they cannot quite see.