Noticing

Love and grief, wives and kids, and books and birds and flowers too

The house I’ve been renting is a different kind of world than I am used to. Starlings bully robins just outside the window. Under the old brick arch where I leave food for the neighborhood’s itinerant cats, blackbirds make a mad dash at the bowl to steal what’s been left uneaten. One morning I walked downstairs to find, perched on the rim of the other bowl I leave out, a sparrow, dipping its beak into and out of the cat’s milk like it were fishing in a pond. Since when do birds drink milk?

In the summer, bats—four of them—swirl through the dusk between the trees and walls of the house. If their paths left wakes the sky would fill with silly string. I have no idea where they come from or where they go when they are not out hunting, but one morning I saw one lying prone on a windowsill by a potted plant, motionless. I thought it was dead, but it wasn’t dead, and it stayed that way all day until it was gone, and I never saw it there again. Later that year, in the dead of winter, molehills emerged like blast points in a mine field. None of winter seems all that dead to me anymore.

I noticed very little coming from the natural world when I was a kid. Counterintuitive, given that childhood is the time when we are at our most productively distractible. I used to think it’s because I grew up in a desert. But that’s nonsense. Deserts are not inert. Classmates of mine used to trap horny toads. My sister and I used to poke at roly-polies. One morning before school she sat down and slipped on her shoe and let out a curdling scream the likes of which I have yet to hear equalled 30-plus years later. She jerked her leg forward so violently that her shoe flew into the air and hit the wall and fell back down to earth. A half-moment later, a large, crunchy cockroach crawled out.

These, though, are not memories of noticing. They are recollections of interactions. It wasn’t that I was seeing what would or would not have happened had I seen it or not. That’s the difference between noticing and encountering. Noticing shows us the world that would be there anyway, with or without our input.

Like, have flowers always moved this much? I’m only now realizing, well into my middle age, that they are no more still than the sunlight is. All those yellow flowers that sprout up in grassy fields keep opening and closing. Sunflowers. Everyone’s heard of sunflowers. But have you seen an entire field of sunflowers with faces as big as human faces? Have you ever seen an entire field looking in one direction in the morning and another in the afternoon and then, in the evening, close its faces until the next morning? I don’t know if these are things I am now noticing because they were not there before, in the places I populated, or if back then I was just unaware.

Probably I sound stupid. Because that’s the thing, there are certain kinds of things that, when you notice them for the first time, they make you feel stupid. They make you feel like you’d been sleepwalking, as though you were being faced with a profound bit of knowledge that you could have had all this time, and for reasons no more justifiable than inertia, have not. The sad irony—that’s another thing I’d never noticed before, just how much of irony is filled with melancholy—I am trained to notice. I am a scholar and teacher of literature. I teach students how to let reading teach them to notice. In the end, that’s what art is for:

“And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art.”

So said the Russian Futurist Viktor Shklovsky back in 1917. The point of art is “to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition.” To make the world strange again.

It’s that idea of again that many have picked up on in the last couple centuries. Wordsworth, Rilke, Freud, and many more conceptualized poetry, and by extension, art overall, as a means of recapturing an idealized kind of childishness. In the way kids go gobsmacked for the littlest things, wonder at the most obvious uncertainties, so audiences, through their experiences with a work of art, re-learn to notice the things our busy adulthoods push out of sight.

The developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik refers to this aspect of childishness as “lantern consciousness.” Normally, it’s incredibly annoying. You know when you tell your four-year-old that it’s time to leave and they can’t make it from the den to the front door without stopping to fiddle at a dozen completely irrelevant things? That’s lantern consciousness, whereas adults, Gopnik writes, have more of a “spotlight consciousness.” Over the years, a mature mind learns to set most of the world to the side so as to spotlight the things that need to get done.

As frustrating as your child’s lantern consciousness usually is, Gopnik argues that there is an evolutionary usefulness to it. This is how children learn. Next time you can’t get your kid to put on their shoes in under half-an-hour, think to yourself, it’s not that they’re getting distracted and you, responsible parent, are not; it’s that they’re noticing stuff and you, responsible parent, are not. Your kid, in this moment, is simply capable of caring about, and learning from, many more things than you are.

That’s what all these arguments about the power of art to reawaken the inner child are essentially about. You cannot care about anything if you have not first noticed it. In noticing, we don’t just see more of what’s out there; more of what’s out there affects us. Art teaches us to care about the world, whether or not the world cares that we do. Nature, meanwhile, becomes the perfect training ground for this lesson, because it offers such a wide array of things worth noticing. The natural world is alive in places we do not realize. That’s why something as simple as taking a walk through the woods or tending to a garden can be so therapeutic. So much self-help these days counsels us to get back to nature. So much of this advice resembles theories of artistic creativity—train yourself to notice, so you can recapture your child-like ability to care. In the process, much more of your life will seem worthy of your ardor.

Let’s not idealize this too much though. A professor of mine once told me that the most boring kind of person is someone who knows a little bit about a great variety of subjects but doesn’t know anything in great depth. Sometimes noticing a lot of different things can distract us from learning enough about any single one of them. Sometimes, too, noticing things you’d previously taken for granted teaches us more than we are capable of handling.

In 1926, the future Nobel-prize winning Italian writer Luigi Pirandello published a novel about a man who loses his mind after his wife points out something he’d never noticed before.

What are you staring at in the mirror? she asks him one morning when he is in the bathroom.

Nothing, he says. Just getting ready.

Oh, she says, I thought you were looking at that bend in your nose.

What? What are you talking about? he says. My nose isn’t crooked.

Well of course it is, sweetheart. You never noticed?

He had not. After his wife pointed it out, though, he could not help but notice. This happens at the beginning of the story. What follows is a steady spiral into madness. Pirandello’s protagonist is undone by the realization that there are things in this world that everyone but him has always seen, about himself. If something as obvious as the angle of his nose had gone unnoticed all these years, how much else could there be that he is ignorant of, and which everyone else understands? The foundations of his self-identity begin to shift.

In order for something to get noticed, it has to be hiding in plain sight. If it’s something only an expert can deduce or a specialist understand, then we are dealing with a different species of comprehension. To notice is to attend to the obvious, in a way that is not obvious to others, or to yourself previously. That’s what makes noticing so redolent of revelation. You are discovering what’s long been there for you to find. You are, in a sense, taking in the generosity of the world.

And with generosity comes risk. For to accept something of what the world offers, suddenly now for the first time, means that for whatever reason, before, you had not. That implies obliviousness, blindness, ignorance, apathy. That’s why noticing is so tied to childhood and all its attendant histrionics. And that’s why noticing is such an important part of falling in love.

Chances are you first realized you were falling for someone because you began to notice more about them. You began to notice things you do not in other people, and you did not in that person beforehand. The way they flip their hair, the angle of their chin when they look up to meet your glance, the sound of their Rs—all this sundry marches into the expanding purview of your attention. Has this person always done these things? Am I the only one seeing them? Why yes, yes of course, because you are the only one who is falling in love with them.

But to fall for someone is not necessarily to see more clearly. It is to see more abundantly. When we first notice the object of our affections, it’s like we are struck with lantern and spotlight consciousness simultaneously. Suddenly we are seeing so much about that person. Suddenly we are not seeing so much else. Isn’t that why we so often fail to see the things that will do us in later on?

Perhaps it is not just coincidence that all these revelations have dawned on me now, in the years when my wife has ended our 20-year relationship. I am, middle aged and suddenly alone, the exact kind of person who is counseled to cultivate noticing. So much of grief, so much of mourning, is taken up with not noticing much beyond one’s individual pain. The moments when the world outside creeps back into our limelight are usually seen as early signs of healing.

This kind of noticing does not always resemble childhood wonder. I think it’s because grief does to our noticing something similar to what love does. My lantern consciousness highlights a lot of things I’d never paid attention to before. But there’s this persistent spotlight that colors those things in a repetitive shade of blue. I’m seeing much more around me, and so much more now feels lonelier. All those animals flitting past my window; they seem so alone in the world. The way the starlings and blackbirds antagonize the finches and sparrows—why do they have to be such jerks?

Even this essay reflects the forms of my noticing. I thought it was going to be a lighthearted piece about the wonders of the natural world. I hardly expected it to end up here. I don’t know. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing either. The things we notice are the things we care about, even if only in passing. That does reassure me. To know I still care, about so much and so little, about the things that still hurt. I guess that means that the things that matter to me, including the ones that I can’t foresee coming up later on, will prove capable of hurting me once again. That’s fine. You can’t notice what’s out there, I mean really notice, without being made vulnerable to it.

And so I will put down this piece of writing and go back out into the garden. And who knows what’s there for me to see, and wonder at, within the unnoticed lives that continue on without me. Like the lemon tree’s leaves that curl in on themselves and roll back open, taking in more or less sunshine as needed. Am I the only one never to have seen this before? They’re like dancers contracting and expanding their torsos, though their rhythm is imperceptible. They make me feel like a wallflower at the side of the dance floor, perhaps still consumed in my isolation, but there is admiration too.