Life & Wisdom Quote by Mervyn Peake

A glass room is a perfect metaphor for the writer’s curse: total visibility paired with total separation. Peake isn’t describing safety; he’s describing a museum display case. “Each day” turns it into routine imprisonment, the kind that looks clean from the outside and feels airless from within. Glass suggests transparency and fragility at once: you can see the world, even be seen by it, yet still be trapped behind an elegant barrier.

The escape route is telling. He doesn’t “open a door” or find a key. He breaks it, and the tool is bodily - “the thrusting of my senses.” That verb is bluntly physical, almost violent, insisting that perception isn’t passive reception but an act of force. In Peake’s universe, imagination and attention aren’t gentle; they’re survival skills. The image also refuses the cliché of art as pure contemplation. Getting to the “great landscape” costs something: splinters, risk, damage. Creation, or even genuine living, leaves you cut up.

Context matters here. Peake’s work (Gormenghast especially) is obsessed with ornate enclosures - castles, rituals, inherited scripts that turn people into props. He also lived with illness and later Parkinson’s, conditions that can make the body itself feel like a pane between you and the world. The line reads like a manifesto against that thickening barrier: if the mind can’t stroll out, it will smash through, and accept the shards as the price of contact.