We’ve lost a proper vision of things. Absently driving customary commutes, glancing over at spouses of 30+ years, weeding the same patches of ground, seeing the same ducks waddle through the park — somehow, along the way, things blur and fade.
It’s a human thing to become benumbed to the world. It is also human, I would suggest, to detest that numbness, and to desire fresh sight.
When I was in college, I remember writing that I wanted to somehow prune my perspective. I already felt dull and cynical (I was 21, if you’re wondering, and very innocent). I wanted “fresh-cut eyes.” To be able to see with the wincing beauty of newness and brightness.
These metaphors all involve sight, which I realize can feel extremely limiting. What about those who cannot see? The understanding Dillard seeks in this chapter, thankfully, transcends one sense. Thoreau also spoke of the vitality of sound (which we so often shut out and ignore), the beauty of touch and smell, and the incredible connection taste offers with the natural world. In all these ways, too, we can become desensitized to the things we experience every day.
So what does it take to fight off our hazy, sleepwalking perspective? How might we—like Scrooge, in A Christmas Carol—wake up and declare that we are brand new, “like a baby,” seeing and experiencing things as if for the first time?
I love the way Annie Dillard explores these things in her chapter on sight. She considers ways of looking that are focused, determined, and full of effort — and she suggests that, perhaps, we can only truly see when we allow ourselves to let go, to become quiet, and to “be still”:
The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance. ‘Launch into the deep,’ says Jacques Ellul, ‘and you shall see.’
We see so little of what truly lies around us. Awareness of the problem is an important step towards correcting this oversight. But Dillard suggests that we must also stop still in order to truly look. Without an agenda or an aim. Without the “commentator,” the “noise of useless interior babble” that can pull us away from our sense of who, when, and where.
“I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.”
Try to finish Chapter 2 by next Tuesday, and consider the following questions as you read:
What is one thing you see every day without actually seeing it? What happens when you take the time to truly attend to that thing? What details have you missed in the past?
Dillard writes of the way our eyes observe “only about thirty percent of the light that comes from the sun,” while our brains edit everything we do see, “cutting and splicing it.” How does this statement make you feel? Is it surprising, scary, exciting, expected?
What habits (walking, sketching, meditation, or what-have-you) help you to embrace the second way of seeing that Dillard describes at the end of her chapter?
For your outdoors challenge: try to spend some time quietly observing a familiar place. What “extravagant” things appear?
An “extravagance” I noticed this week: strawberries shaped like flowers. The “misshapen,” irregular strawberries we carried home from a local farm probably wouldn’t make it into a grocery store. But we peered at them in wonder. When you cut them open, they looked like a ruby star. (We also found lots of “normal” strawberries that were wondrous and lovely.)
Beautiful!
Thanks for sharing. I was deeply moved by your writing: “But we peered at them in wonder. When you cut them open, they looked like a ruby star.” I will plan to read Dillard along with you all.