Hemingway believed a reader could sense the essence beneath his writing, glimpse a world over the horizon of the page. He compared it to an iceberg. His experience at sea, watching marlins mate, harpooning and losing a sperm whale, the stories retold in the fishing villages, were all imbued in him and would permeate the sparse words that hit the reader’s eye.
His writing was describing something that was of one piece, and if the writer and reader were in sync, showing a slice would reveal the whole. In Death in the Afternoon, he wrote,
“If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader … will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.”
Thoreau had the same thought. Walking in the woods past the tumble-down homes of former inhabitants, overtaken by roots and brambles, he felt he could know something of their lives and what they had added to the place. The true sense of a thing was felt beyond first sight. He wrote in his journal,
“A fact stated barely is dry. It must be the vehicle of some humanity … It must be warm, moist, incarnated — have been breathed on at least. A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it.”
These two intuitives are inviting us into the perceptive world of writers and philosophers, where it is possible to know the history of a thing beyond the surface of its appearance. Our usual way of seeing is a passing glance, a flash of pattern recognition, an assumption by first impression. When I am racing past my life, I don’t see my life. What fuller shape of perception is available if I pause to collect myself, settle the dust of my anxious movement, and look? Can I detect the craft of the carver working the blade against the wood, or the seasons of sun and rain that built the rings beneath the bark of oak? When I make this effort, or better said, when I let the effort go, there is always more arising, more to fathom.
How much more so with people. Isn’t familiarity a kind of veil, an interpretation I conjure up that cheapens the brilliance they present in this moment? If I become porous, can I perceive the history of a person – their hardships, heartaches, longings and regrets, their celebrations, delights, and triumphs? Perhaps I can loosen my fixed idea of this unique soul before me and allow the river of their life, the floating curls of leaves and eddies and sediments, to be absorbed in me.
There’s an experiment I sometimes do when I’m with someone, where I let all knowledge of them fade, as if I am a foreigner, or an alien, and I see what wants to appear, every impression a first impression. It’s not an exercise in analysis, just a way of being with. What comes forth is always richer than what I had imagined.
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