Seeing
- Annie's thinking about seeing, and specifically, about perspective.
- She remembers when she was a kid and used to hide pennies for people to find. How excited you get about a penny, she thinks, depends on the level of "healthy poverty and simplicity" you've cultivated in your life.
- She considers what specialists, who know where to look, can see in nature that she can't.
- Still, she's determined to keep looking. One of the things she wants to see is the green ray, a streak of light that comes out of the sun for two seconds at sunset. Another is a flying squirrel.
- In his book The Mountains, Stewart Edward White said something that affected her: To really see, you have to "forget the naturally obvious and construct an artificial obvious."
- Wait, what?
- Basically, what she means is this: Narrowing down what you're looking for will help you see it. If you're trying to see a frog, look first for a patch of green. (Or, as she learned when trying this exact feat, greenish-brown.)
- Trying to see stuff is driving her a little nuts, and the more she thinks about how to see, the more she realizes how much she can't see.
- She tells us about a book she read once—Space and Sight by Marius von Senden—about cataract operations.
- von Senden said that when blind people are given sight, they have no sense of space or context. Form, distance, height, and size make no sense to them, and instead, they see the world as patches of color; shadows looked like "dark marks."
- Other ideas that were difficult to grasp: that a large object could obscure a smaller one, that they could move between color patches, and that there was space behind them they couldn't see.
- Some of the newly sighted blind people found that it was easier to navigate if they closed their eyes.
- After she read von Senden's book, Dillard saw color patches for weeks. Her new way of seeing the world was based on what she had learned about how other people saw it.
- One day last summer in Tinker Creek, while watching fish, she realized that if she gazed at the brim of her hat rather than directly at the fish, she saw them as flashes of silver. She thinks that seeing in an "abstracted and dazed" way is to see purely—in other words, to see the color patches.
- However, the most important thing she's learned about seeing is that you have to silence the ongoing babble inside your head in order to really appreciate what's around you.
- She's been looking for something that one of von Senden's blind patients described: "the tree with lights in it." She sees it occasionally, but she can't summon it—she just suddenly sees the world as illuminated with flame.
- When she sees the tree, she feels that it's "less like seeing than like being for the first time seen."