The Art of Seeing
How Thoreau improved my vision
I thought my vision was pretty good. Not quite 20–20, but close. Then I read Thoreau.
Yes, that Thoreau. Forget what you may have read by or about the “hermit Concord.” He is misunderstood. His experiment on Walden Pond was about seeing. All the rest — the solitude, the simplicity — were means to this end.
Reading Thoreau made me realize how little I saw. Sure, my eye captured light signals, and my mind processed them, but did I really see? I was, at best, a lazy seer. A lot of us are, which strikes me as odd, given that we live in an allegedly visual culture. The truth is: we are a visual culture the way McDonald’s is a restaurant. We consume a lot of images but savor very few.
Not Henry David Thoreau. His vision was legendary. At a glance, he could estimate the height of a tree or the weight of a calf. He’d reach into a bushel of pencils and, by sight alone, grab exactly a dozen. He had a knack for finding buried Indian arrowheads. “There is one,” he’d say, kicking it up with his foot.
Unlike his fellow Transcendentalists, Thoreau was less interested in cultivating “a faith in things unseen.” He had greater faith in things seen. He was less interested in the nature of reality than the reality of nature. Was there more to the world than meets the eye…
