Look and see!

 

It can be an ugly world. It can be a boring world. It can be a world full of distraction. Which is why the artist and the philosopher must learn how to cultivate their eyes. In 1940, the writer James Baldwin was walking in New York City with the painter Beauford Delaney, his friend and mentor. As they crossed the street, Delaney stopped the young Baldwin. “Look,” he said, as he pointed down into the gutter. “What do you see?” All Baldwin saw was a puddle. Delaney told him to look again. This time Baldwin saw, as Nicholas Boggs recounts in Baldwin: A Love Story, “a reflection of buildings moving like mercury in the gutter’s black water, distorted and radiant.” It is clear in Meditations that someone did this for Marcus Aurelius. How else can you explain his beautiful observations of seemingly ordinary or even unpleasant things—from the way an olive rots on the ground or the foam flecked on a boar’s mouth? What else could explain not just his turns of phrase but his ability to find philosophical truths in his own struggles as a human being? Perhaps it was Rusticus, his philosophy teacher, who taught him this, or Fronto, his rhetoric teacher, or some poet or writer he met, but in any case, as Baldwin said of Delaney, “The reality of his seeing caused me to begin to see.” And so it goes for us. We must cultivate the ability to see—to see beauty and poetry everywhere—because it is everywhere. We must look into the gutter. We must change our aperture and perspective so that amidst the muddle and puddles of life, we can see what the artist and the philosopher sees. Reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations can change the way you see the world