Learning to See
“Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.” ALBERT CAMUS · THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS
We assume seeing is something we already do. The eyes open and the world arrives. Camus is making a stranger claim: that seeing is a skill, that it decays, and that it has to be learned again.
Most of the time we do not see the world so much as identify it. A tree is glanced at and filed under tree. A stranger’s face registers as face. The mind sorts quickly into boxes it already owns, which is efficient and lets us cross a city without exhausting ourselves. The cost is that we end up living among labels instead of among things.
Thinking, in Camus’s sense, breaks that trance. It means stopping in front of something ordinary long enough for it to turn strange again. The crack in the sidewalk. The particular yellow of four o’clock light in winter. How a friend’s laugh starts before the joke has finished. Attended to properly, any of these becomes what he calls a privileged place.
That takes effort. Attention has to be pointed somewhere, held there, and kept from sliding off.
You have walked past something a hundred times without once looking at it. Choose that thing. Stay in front of it until it hands you something you had not noticed. The staying is the thinking.
