We last left our irritable protagonist in a conversation with his boss, Julius Enderby. He is reluctant to get down to business.
He stood up, turned away, and walked to the wall behind his desk. He touched an inconspicuous contact switch and a section of the wall grew transparent.
Baley blinked at the unexpected insurge of grayish light.
The Commissioner smiled. “I had this arranged specially last year, Lije. I don’t think I’ve showed it to you before. Come over here and take a look. In the old days, all rooms had things like this. They were called ‘windows.’ Did you know that?”
Baley knew that very well, having viewed many historical novels.
“I’ve heard of them,” he said.
“Come here.”
Baley squirmed a bit, but did as he was told. There was something indecent about the exposure of the privacy of a room to the outside world. Sometimes the Commissioner carried his affectation of Medievalism to a rather foolish extreme.
Like his glasses, Baley thought.
That was it! That was what made him look wrong!
Baley said, “Pardon me, Commissioner, but you’re wearing new glasses, aren’t you?”
Yet another aspect of the setting has been established: Everything is enclosed. To the point that windows are a novelty known about by the curious and knowledgeable. Even more important, windows are unusual to the point that look out of them provokes discomfort for Baley. In our world, it is only the most intensely agoraphobic that experience anxiety from merely looking at the open and the outside. Furthermore, the language Baley uses to describe his distaste suggest that his feelings on the subject are the default mode of thinking in his society.
The label of "Medievalism" Baley uses to describe Enderby's affinity for objects such as glasses and windows shows that the label has shifted from Europe 1000 years ago to 20th century Earth in general. Enderby in this case would be like having someone proudly display a 10th century English coat of arms in their office.
The next few paragraphs describe how Baley and Enderby are lost in the spectacle of watching rain coming down out the window. They then have this exchange:
He said, “It always seems a waste for all that water to come down on the city. It should restrict itself to the reservoirs.”
“Lije,” said the Commissioner, “you’re a modernist. That’s your trouble. In Medieval times, people lived in the open. I don’t mean on the farms only. I mean in the cities, too. Even in New York. When it rained, they didn’t think of it as waste. They gloried in it. They lived close to nature. It’s healthier, better. The troubles of modem life come from being divorced from nature. Read up on the Coal Century, sometimes.”
Baley had. He had heard many people moaning about the invention of the atomic pile. He moaned about it himself when things went wrong, or when he got tired. Moaning like that was a built-in facet of human nature. Back in the Coal Century, people moaned about the invention of the steam engine. In one of Shakespeare’s plays, a character moaned about the invention of gunpowder. A thousand years in the future, they’d be moaning about the invention of the positronic brain.
The hell with it.
Here we have an age old argument: Old vs. New, progress vs. reaction, "The Good Old Days" vs. "Our Ancestors Sucked."
Deep irony can be found in some of Julius's proclamation. It is in fact a huge health concern that people in the US have taken to being inside most of the time, especially in the cities. Plenty of people have tiny trees caged in wire the closest piece of nature within miles, and we most certainly don't "glory" in rain.
In terms of our society, parallels can be drawn with the rampant fetishism of the 1950s and 60s. That numinous, nonexistent time when men were men, women were women and all children acted like ones in "Leave it to Beaver". Nostalgia is most poisonous when it enshrines a pop culture version of the past.
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