I try to walk away, but find myself stopping at the door, turning, walking the perimeter of the little room to view the box from all sides. Then I’m pulled back to it again, unsatisfied, wanting more.

The room where nothing’s clear, even the dog smeared up the side of the wall—that room comes clear, seen through the right glass. The lens corrects, clarifies, puts things in their proper arrangement. The glass lozenge allows me to see that I am looking into not merely one room but a house: there are chambers beyond this one, rooms with people in them—a woman reading, quietly, in a chair beside a window’s wash of cool Northern light. That Dutch glow seems made of both physical light and the lamp-shine of interiority, the polish things acquire in the steady, affectionate illumination of attention. Occupied rooms, lit by our seeing.

He doesn’t believe in darkness, Samuel Von Hoogstraten, doesn’t hold with chiaroscuro; for him clarity is all, and isn’t it possible that clarity might shine into every corner of the house, might bring its resolving certainty to everything, bring each object into right relation with all the other things in this little world: his terrarium, his terrestrial comedy of illusion? Does he mean that even the most distorted form might come true? No matter how deep the trouble, how twisted the form, the rectifying lens of art could set it right?

Or no—does he mean it this way, that art must distort, must bend the shapes of things? If this hellish playhouse weren’t deranged, then the device wouldn’t work, the lens would smear rather than resolve, cripple these figures rather than bring them to life.

But there are two lenses, dual peepholes through which to peer into this little chamber. Is that the point? Always a choice to make, which aperture to put the eye to. From either direction the house goes on and on, and even at the end of the diminishing series of chambers there isn’t an end but a doubt—a slice of room, maybe another door, at least a window that bathes a woman or a man who can’t be seen, a map or a Turkey carpet, in that pearly winter light. Perhaps a mirror’s hung on the wall, and in that way the chain of rooms is infinite, continuous, unknowable.

I try again to move on, into the next, brighter gallery. But it’s no use, it’s Samuel Von Hoogstraten I’m thinking of. What I want to be is alone, in this intimate room, with his box. When anyone else enters I wait in a corner till the intruder passes on, until I can return to my private study.