The Art of Seeing

How Thoreau improved my vision

Photo by Harry Quan on Unsplash

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? Probably, but what does meet the eye is plenty miraculous, so let’s start there. Thoreau valued vision even more than knowledge. Knowledge is always tentative, imperfect. Today’s certainty is tomorrow’s nonsense. As he said, “Who can say what is? He can only say how he sees.”

How exactly do we see? Most of us subscribe to the photographic model of seeing. We believe our eyes capture images from the world like a camera, then relay these images to our brain. Our eyes “photograph,” say, the coffee mug in front of you.

It’s a nice model. It is also wrong. Seeing is less like photography and more like language. We don’t see the world so much as converse with it. Consider something as simple as seeing a coffee mug. We don’t see the mug in front of us. We tell ourselves it is there. The coffee mug sends electromagnetic waves, nothing more, to your eye and brain. From that raw data, we create information, then meaning — in this case, that the object…