CRYTOSCOPOPHILIA

have a love of odd words. I love finding them out and thinking about how I might have occasion to use them. I delight in imaginary circumstances under which I somehow engineer (at a really posh party with really smart people where I am very thin) a conversation in which I am suddenly able to seamlessly insert a word that I love, completely in context. I imagine the look of respect on their faces as I say that I do know how to play the piano, but I’m not very good, because while I took lessons when I was little, I was a committed misodoctakleidist (a piano student who really hates to practice). Or in a conversation about the supernatural I could say, “Well, Mark, the Bermuda Triangle may seem naufragous, but really, it’s not borne out statistically.” I would be, you understand, the only person at the party who knew that naufragous means “causing shipwrecks,” though nobody would say they didn’t know that word because (in the party in my mind) they all want to be like me. (This fantasy may stem from real party episodes where people were glad not to be me, like the time I had my skirt tucked into my underpants, but I digress.)

This love of words has yielded up some real treats. For example, I take great joy in knowing (though I have yet to figure out how to work it into conversation) that a ranarium is a frog farm (as a related point, one who eats frogs is batrachophagous). And, likely because I am one of the world’s only writers working within the niche field of knitting humor, I have managed to successfully use the word “adoxography,” which means “skilled writing about an unimportant subject,” in a professional context. My favorite ever, though, the most fulfilling word of all, is “crytoscopophilia.” When I first heard it I loved the feeling of it in my mouth—“cry-toe-sco-po-feel-e-ah”—but like most of the really great words I’ve ever learned, it was the meaning of it that turned out to be what gave it great and odd power.

Crytoscopophilia is the urge to look in people’s windows as you pass. The minute I read it I knew it was me. I do that all the time. Out for a walk at night, with the homes that you pass by lit up from the inside, offering little glimpses of the lives inside. It turns out that it’s a nearly universal urge, too, since almost everyone who hears it proclaims that they have crytoscopophilia. The few who don’t have it think it’s creepy, but I defend the practice and point out that crytoscopophilia departs from what those who don’t partake in it might call stalking, peeping, or an invasion of privacy in one significant way. The definition is precise. It is the urge to look in windows “as you pass,” and that’s the relevant part. It stops being crytoscopophilia the minute that you start thinking about standing in someone’s rosebushes, or consider fetching a ladder or some night-vision goggles.

I love what I can tell about people’s homes just from the momentary vignettes I see. I love the tiny story that is told in that moment as I catch a glimpse of someone putting a book on the shelf, or a couple exchanging words, or a family eating dinner. It sets my mind afire, and I can’t help but extrapolate and wonder. What book is going onto the shelf? Was it good? Should I read it? Maybe they were just looking something up? Maybe it’s a photo album and this character in my now imagined world is marking the day that they returned from the war and fondly recalling a fallen comrade. Perhaps the couple exchanging words are talking about the bills or maybe they’re planning a bank heist in Switzerland. There’s just no way to know, and that’s the magic. We have no idea what relevance the moment those people are having has to the world, but we are so interested that we actually think that something satisfying and important can be gleaned by knowing that their living room is blue. (Maybe that’s just me, but I’m terrifically interested in the decorating habits of my targets.)

Hemingway allegedly wrote one of the world’s shortest short stories. It was six words and read, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” I think about that a lot as I glance in windows and try to figure out what I can gain. It’s not about what I can see. As in Hemingway’s story, it’s about the beauty and intrigue of getting a taste of what I don’t know. In that very short story, there is very little stated. You’re left to imagine the details. It’s precisely that magic that we gain from a crytoscopophilic glance—one tiny nugget of information that sets off a whole stream of imagination. Crytoscopophilia is the magic of inference. What can you tell—or what do you think you can tell—from a narrow flash of insight? Why were the shoes never worn? Was there no baby? Did a baby come but not walk? Is it a tragic story of infertility, or did the family get rich and buy better shoes, relegating these ordinary ones to the sale shelf? There are actually a thousand stories present in that one magnificent phrase, and each one of them is equally possible. Inference is defined as a conclusion reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning, which makes it sound as if it’s firm—as in “he inferred from the presence of the snow that it had been snowing,” but the magic lies in the other possibilities. With inference, you’re working with evidence and reasoning, not facts. Maybe what really happened was that there was snow because a film starring Tom Cruise was made just there, and a snow-making machine the size of Malawi was brought in to transform a hot July street into November for a few short hours. Inference is not just the ability to know what happened based on what you see and know, but the ability to guess at a thousand possibilities.

When looking at ancient languages and the way they move around the globe, linguisticians really have no choice but to use inference to guess at the source of the language. There’s nobody to ask and no one wrote down the exact path a language took. There are only clues. For example, if a language has no word for “cow,” you can infer that the language comes from a place without cows. A language with no word for artichoke, likely artichokeless. A place with no artichokes and cows? You can put that together and come up with a locale. Linguisticians can tell us that there is no word for knitting in any ancient language on Earth. Not Greek, Roman, Aramaic—nothing. The first appearance of a word for knitting was in the Middle East about 1,000 years ago. In the English-speaking world, nobody draws a picture of it, or includes it in a story, until Shakespeare’s time. From that historians can infer that there was no knitting there until that time, and that’s a huge thing to know about knitting, and it’s derived from inference—little peeks, small pieces—and we all do it. We’re convinced it works and that we’re truly finding things out.

The trouble is, what have you really found out? Well, knitting really is only about a thousand years old. The information we glean through inference there is reliable and accurate. The trouble with information you get is that it’s sometimes accurate, but usually it’s not. I personally have had a whole whack of conversations in my life based on nothing more than a little bite like, “Did you hear what he said?” which is a fairly inevitable stop on the way to, “Why do you think he said that?” which leads inexorably to, “I think he likes you.” Shockingly, I’m in my forties and have only just now worked out that this system is about as reliable as me walking by a window and deciding that the couple talking inside are planning that Swiss bank heist. It probably means that I’m not hopeless, that I no longer think that the only conclusion a girlfriend should infer should lead her to write what will clearly be her new last name in her notebook seventy times.

Seeing this rampant case of crytoscopophilia in myself, the way that as I get these little bits of information about people around me as I pass, and knowing as I do that this urge is almost universal, it makes me wonder what people infer about me when they look in my windows. Someone passing my house at night and looking in my windows is going to see some stuff a little off the norm. They would likely see me knitting, and from that they might infer that I have a nice hobby. That’s a pretty normal thing to think if you see someone knitting. Maybe though, just maybe this person has a dog, and my house is on their evening route and they pass by my house every night.

There’s a family on the far corner of my jogging path and I pass by them all the time. Every time I do, there’s a man folding laundry and a woman watching TV. After I’d seen them doing the same thing a few times, I started to form opinions—to infer things. I inferred that they’re people who like routine. (I can’t fault them for that, since I wouldn’t know it about them if I didn’t have one.) I also inferred that they have a modern relationship—I mean, he’s doing the laundry and she’s watching TV. Statistically, men in relationships only do 10 percent of the laundry in North America, so as soon as I see that reversal I’ve decided that he’s the best guy on Earth and that their marriage is terrific. Of course, the inference I’m making about this couple is crazy. They might not even be married. They could be roommates, and he’s doing his own laundry. It could be that they are married and that she does everything else to do with every single one of the chores, and this is the one thing the jerk ever steps up to the bat for. He could be a neatnik; she could be a slob. She could be allergic to laundry soap, or maybe she has a broken wrist from a nasty fall from a bus, and he’s just doing the laundry until it’s better. I really don’t know—I really don’t—but my biases and hopes feed my imagination, and because of my own stuff, I want to believe that they’re just so happy together and that they’re enjoying the fruits of a noble marriage with a truly gracious and equal division of labor. I can’t help it.

I wonder then, about those people who have my house on their route. If they pass by once and see me knitting, it’s likely to be interpreted as a moment, a little vignette. It’s unlikely that they’re going to make a big decision about me or my lifestyle. If they pass my house every day though, they’re going to notice that the knitting happens a lot. A whole lot. Regardless of the time of day or night, anyone conducting even the most casual and benign of surveillance is going to come to the conclusion that the amount of time I spend on yarn-related activities is really high. (This is not all my fault, by the way. The amount of time I spend with yarn wouldn’t be so bizarre if the rest of the culture I live in wasn’t skewing the bell curve by engaging in no yarn activities at all.) Maybe one day, after a while, they would walk past my house, glance in, and, much to their relief, I’m not knitting. “Thank heaven,” they’d think, because they really were starting to think that I spent an obsessive amount of time at it. Only then would they notice that, while I’m not knitting… I’m sitting at a spinning wheel.

I worry about this. I understand fully and deeply that the ideas that these strangers hold about me can’t possibly matter. If someone walks their dog past my house every evening and comes to the conclusion that I’m an obsessive freak with no life, or a social life as barren as the Sahara, there is no possible way that can influence my life, not really. The people who know and love me still will, I’ll still have a job, and the roses in the back will still get black spot every summer no matter what I do. Nothing will be better or worse for me if that guy or a multitude of people walking by all decide that I’m boring, old, weird, simple, and likely have a thousand cats that they just can’t see. It wouldn’t even matter if they all formed a club where on Tuesday nights they all walked by together, casting a crytoscopophilic peek into my window en masse while wearing T-shirts that said, “we glance in the Crazy Knitting Lady’s windows together.” It wouldn’t matter at all. I mean, I wouldn’t like it; I would have my own inferences to make about those people, not the least of which would be that they were trapped in a hopeless stereotype about knitters. Nope, it shouldn’t matter at all what they think, so the clever part of me is stunned that I really do care what complete strangers might divine from a glance in my window. I want the story they tell themselves to be accurate… or at least if it can’t be accurate, I’d like for it to be flattering.

I would love for people to walk by, glance in my window, and think two things. First, that I have exquisite taste in home decorating, and second, I’d like for them to see me knitting or spinning and at least come close to inferring the right thing. I’d like them to infer that I’m a fiber artist, intent on using and creating my own raw materials to express myself through a constructive art form that’s a thousand years old. Barring that, I’d settle for them at least thinking that what I’m doing is interesting, instead of a sign that time spent with me would likely be as stimulating or appealing as a bowl of cold oatmeal. Realistically I don’t expect them to infer it, and I understand that we all come to infer things based on our own biases and theories, and that every single one of us thinks that you can look at what a person does for one second a day and be sure that you know something about them. Hell, the fact that I care what couch you have when I pass by even means that I believe that I can tell something interesting about you from what you own. (This problem is just one of the many reasons that I don’t let people open closets in my house.) If I see that you’ve painted your walls purple with pink stars and hung vivid paintings, obtained a polka-dot couch, and are in the process of hanging chartreuse-striped curtains, then I know I’m not going to think you’re shy, even though there are a million reasons (if we remember the rules of inference) why you could be doing that, including that you’re colorblind or have lost a hideous bet with your rather cruel, yet creative, cousin Sven.

Crytoscopophilia is the urge to gather information so that we can infer the snot out of something, because most of us think that inference works, even if the truth is that most of us get it pretty wrong a lot of the time. We’re simply not neutral enough. We’re too biased, and we think we know too much. That one glance I get through your window doesn’t explain anything to me about why that man washes your underpants, and it doesn’t tell anyone anything about me or the seemingly alarming amount of yarn I have and the shocking quantity of time I spend fiddling with it. It makes me wonder why any of us are crytoscopophilic at all, considering how little of what we gain is of actual use. This is what I’m thinking when I’m out for a walk and I’m glancing in your window, and this is what I’m thinking when you’re out for a walk and I see you glancing in mine.

I’m also thinking that I should get curtains that are less sheer, but maybe that’s just me.