Muntin

The girl stood at the tall window of the storeroom and ran her thumb along one of the thin wooden bars that crossed the glass. The single opening had been parted into a grid of small square panes, each one no wider than her hand, and she wanted to know why a window was not simply left as one clear sheet. She asked Nyra whether the little bars were there to hold the glass or to spoil the view.

Nyra set down the jar she was carrying and came to stand beside her. “They hold the glass, yes, and they do more than that,” she said. “A great sheet of glass is hard to make and harder to keep. Break it and you lose the whole window at once. Part it into panes with these bars, and a crack takes one small square and leaves the rest whole.”

The girl pressed her face closer and looked through one pane, then slid her eye to the next. “But the bars sit in the way,” she said. “I cannot see the orchard all at once.” Nyra nodded and did not argue the point.

“You cannot,” Nyra answered, “and that is the quiet gift of them. The eye takes the orchard one pane at a time, a branch here, a path there, the gate in the far corner, and it holds each small view long enough to see it. A single wide sheet gives you everything and lets you keep almost none of it. The bar that seems to divide is the thing that lets you take the whole in by parts.”

She thought of this later, turning a long page of close writing, and saw that a book does the same. A whole matter is too wide to hold in one clear sheet, so it is parted into lines and pages, each a small pane the eye can rest in, and the small bars between them are not a loss but the very means of seeing. The book keeps the glass, and you keep the parting of it.