I looked at my wife across the table and suddenly saw how beautiful she is, as if seeing her for the first time. And then, halfway through that spark of joy, I realized with dismay that after ten years together, I’d often failed to really see her.
Seeing is an essential component of creativity, in art and literature. And seeing is not a skill. It is a gift known best to a naïve child encountering the world anew.
If I sound more blissful than usual, that’s because I’ve just returned from the spectacular, mountainous isle of Corsica, a part of France that is off the coast of Italy. The photo here is of my wife, Sarah, at a table in a glorious, outdoor restaurant down a long sandy road in the middle of a vineyard.
Renewing the clarity of seeing requires days of peace. Mine happen in nature. It takes more than a few days without news, meetings, assignments—or time itself—for the fog to clear. The fog that doesn’t register as fog, because it forms the surface of all our days as they pass full of busy thoughts.
I think about Sarah’s beauty and other wonderful qualities frequently. But, as artists know, the mind makes cartoons to stand in for complex images to manage the cognitive load of getting through the day. We’d all be bug-eyed fools if we went through every day seeing everything as if for the first time.
In art, one can instinctively see the realness of work by a painter who sees authentically. In writing, it may be easier to trick the reader, but you can immediately recognize a true expression taken directly from life.
In both cases, such works are rare. Translating a vision to the canvas or the page takes a lot of skill, developed from endless study and practice. But that work can cloud the vision. The work can get too easy.
We start as children seeing perfectly, but by the time we have learned the craft of expression, too much has happened—the cartoons and mental debris of habit block the view.
The contemporary pace of life and constant interruptions from electronic communication interfere as well—seeing is getting ever harder. Our minds don’t have time to make big thoughts in the short spans of quiet we give them.
One of the most difficult and important steps in any writing project is knowing clearly and deeply what you want to say. You cannot write well without doing that. But to say anything worthwhile—that’s big thinking that takes uninterrupted time.
Same for living. I’m so grateful to have wandered around that sandy island, read a book all day in the sun, talked for hours, day after day, and fallen asleep utterly relaxed. Because I surprised myself.
I’ve known this all along. I often counsel writers on stepping back, slowing down, and letting their thoughts grow. I know how important it is to see.
And yet here she was, as if brand new, this lovely, kind, funny, beautiful woman. I was so glad to see her again.
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