The Difference Between Seeing and Looking
...also the old gods are returning with Rod Dreher, and important books
Seeing and Looking
One morning this week, my one-year-old son Alexander stood on a bench next to our bedroom window. Every few seconds, he pointed at a creature, such as a pigeon perching on a branch of the blossom tree or a squirrel scurrying along the picket fence to steal some bird seed left there the day before. Alex can’t talk yet, so the pointing had to suffice, but it was accompanied by a high-pitched squeal of delight and laughter.
When I was a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child…
The Apostle Paul said this in 1 Corinthians 13 to indicate that a stage of celestial maturity awaits us when we come to see God face to face in the final state. But there is also a sense in which the glory of childhood is lost when we grow up in this life. We stop looking at the world, and the only thing left is to see it.
Put simply, seeing is the utilitarian way that adults approach things. Everything is for something else. There is always some task to be done, some time that needs to be utilised. We never, therefore, give anything our full and undivided attention because everything has to serve something else
But looking is when we give something our focus not for some other purpose, but for no reason at all, apart from the sustained attention that we offer to that thing.
This is a distinction that was first made by the art critic Roger Fry and is repeated by Professor Ben Quash in his powerful book Abiding:
When we look, our vision ‘dwells much more consciously and deliberately’ upon the object in front of us. Fry thinks children have a special capacity for this, because they have not yet fully learnt the more defensive techniques of mere ‘seeing’.
Ben Quash, Abiding. p.65
Later in the week, from another window (this one in our hall), we watched a squirrel first attempt to eat some seed from a bird feeder and then fall five or so feet to the ground, then scurry up the trunk and hop from branch to branch until he attained the highest one possible. Moving swiftly towards the thinnest end, the squirrel then jumped from it onto the roof of our house and disappeared round the chimney. Alex watched it with delight, once again laughing and pointing.
I heard Ian MacGilchrist talking about the way that young children have not yet developed sufficiently to be able to categorise things in a specifically linguistic and verbal sense. This is (roughly-speaking) a ‘left-brained’ activity when it does develop and it is, of course, very useful to be able to categorise things. But categorising things gets in the way of a more immediate and perhaps joyful experience of them. And it leads inexorably towards a more utilitarian apprehension: What is this thing for? If it’s for nothing, we are quickly bored of it, and move on.
This explains why Alex likes watching birds out of the window so much more than me. To me, they’re just birds. But to him: what are they? They are something far more luminous and mysterious and joyful.
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