[Carl Copeland]

“Oh” does need a comma, but the reason you’ve left it without may be that it’s masquerading as the vocative “O.” I know you’ve gone round and round with this, but “Oh” is a puff of some emotion or other—“Alas” or “Wow” or “Now I get it”—while “O” means “I’m talking to you, window.” When I read it, I get the latter meaning, no matter how you spell it, so (pace the anti-archaists) I still vote for “O” with no “h” and no comma.

I like your move away from the Gothic in S3L2, but I’m with Jim on “dilapidated.” It may be telly, as Sam suggests, but to my ear it paints a picture by sounding dilapidated. It’s also touchingly homely, like an aging friend—all of which is lost with the “illusionary” veer into metaphysics. One also wonders what the illusion is. The window tells the truth; it’s just a limited truth and a different truth each time. You’d need more than that to drive home the point that none of these scenes in itself “embodies the essence of reality.” (Buddhists would say the illusion is in thinking there is such an essence, but that’s neither here nor there.) I’d leave the “metaphysical underlayer” where it was.