Strix

The Half-Seen World

ISPENT most of a long train journey last week alternately reading Maurice Baring's Lost Lectures and looking out of the window at the landscape, which was lit by a pale sun. The combination of these two activities put me in mind of a letter I once had from Maurice Baring, whom I knew only slightly but remember as an enchanting character. I had written a book of travel, and he wrote to me praising it, which was a kind and encouraging thing to do to a very young author. He offered one remonstrance. In my book I had said of a certain city that I did not propose to describe its wonders and curiosities because they had often been described before. Maurice Baring said that this was wrong of me; it did not matter; how often anything had been described before, because no two people saw, let alone interpreted, the same thing in the same way.

It was not perhaps a very profound observation, but it stuck in my mind, and ever since I have been interested in the different things that different people see. We start, as children, by seeing everything, or as much of everything as we can take in; and, although it would quickly become rather tiring, it would do us all good if we had a child (or a foreigner) as our constant companion, for they would always be noticing things which we had long ceased to notice or perhaps never noticed at all.

* * 111 While the train ran through the open countryside, I saw a good deal of what there was to see, or at least I flattered myself that I did. Had I had that child (or that foreigner) in the carriage. I could have answered most of their questions : the habits of the buzzard, the, economic life-span of the cricket- bat willow, the folly—briefly epidemic some seventy years ago—of planting Austrian pine, the colouring of a palomino horse, the supposed advantages of covering a silage clamp with chalk—on most of• the phenomena which flitted past the window I could have discoursed with reasonable speciousness.

But whenever civilisation hove in view, I was for practical purposes gravelled.

`What,' asks the child, 'do they make in that factory?'

`You can see for yourself, my dear,' I reply, 'for the name of the establishment is painted in letters six feet high on its walls. The premises are those of Messrs. Buckshott and Fair- weather (Crucibles) Ltd.'

'Yes, but what are crucibles?' , `And in what way,' asks the foreigner, 'is this factory integrated to the conurbation of, the city which we are approaching?'

'And is that smoke, or steam, coming out of those chim- neys?' inquires the child.

I clap my hands petulantly. Both figments vanish. But I am forced to realise that, had they not materialised when they did, I should for practical purposes not have seen the enormous, significant contemporary buildings in which Buckshott,, and the indefatigable Fairweather, carry on their activities.

* * * Observe that General inspecting a battalion of infantry. He, and the little retinue which follows him slowly round the ranks, all appear to be looking, and looking intently, at the same things; yet in fact they all see something different. The General, if he is a sensible General, looks first into the men's eyes—glazed, slightly defiant or•klightly apprehensive, and, if it is a cold day, watering. In ch6m he hopes to discover a clue to the quality of the baton, and in this, rather sun. prisingly, he is often (in the case of a bad unit, always) successful. He has an eye for campaign ribbons, which offer the easiest of all conversational openings; and he may have got some little fad or hobbyhorse—something to do with the correct size of shoulder-titles, or the aesthetic shortcomings of a faded divisional sign—which he will look for a chance of trotting out.

The commanding officer,,at his heels, appears to be seeing exactly the same things, but in fact the images conveyed to his mind come mostly from the middle distance, where several small, untoward things are occurring. Two signallers are wrestling ominously with the cable of the public address system, a wireless in a but on the up-wind side of the parade ground is relaying 'Family Favourites' at full blast, the second- in-command's frightful bull-terrier is waddling stertorously down from the officers' mess in quest of its master, and the General's car is not in its allotted place. These are the phenomena which engross the commanding officer.

The regimental sergeant-major's approach is best described as pointilliste. The fleck of shaving soap on the lobe of an ear, the safety-catch in as quarter-cock position, the beret slightly awry, the thumb not quite in line with the seam of the trousers, the tiny macula upon refulgent brass—these are his eye-fodder. He is like the kestrel, who hardly sees the corn for the field-mice.

None of these can be said to see more, or less, than any of the others; they simply see quite different aspects of the same thing. And if they—all trained in the same profession, all ostensibly using their eyes at the same time in the same place for the same purpose—do not receive identical impressions, it is hardly surprising that aimless individualists like us deploy our powers 9f observation in contrasting ways.

* When you enter a room for the first time, what do you not see? I don't, to begin with, see the carpet (although in the unlikely event of the 'skin of some wild animal being used to cover part of the floor, I should probably notice it before anything else). Any flowers which the room may contain will be for practical purposes invisible to me; and though I should certainly take note of any framed photographs, I might easily do so without seeing the piano on which they stood. I should take an early opportunity of looking out of the windows, but it is almost inconceivable that I could tell you afterwards what the curtains were made of. I should notice the books but not the bookcases; I should not see the wallpaper at all, unless it was the old-fashioned, full-blooded kind, on which birds of paradise bicker over pomegranates; and it would be roughly 100-8 against my being aware that the room contained a priceless porcelain bowl.

It sounds, as a matter of fact, the sort of room which a woman would be better at seeing than a man, for a woman's vision is at its best indoors. Yet even women (or so it often seems to men) have their blind spots and miss the obviously important things while discerning minutia with great pre- cision. It seems, sometimes, almost incredible that a lady should notice the dust on the mantelpiece and yet not notice that the head hanging over it is a royal; or, meeting a man for the first time, should observe that he bites his finger-nails but not that he belongs to the I Zingari.

Still, it all goes to prove my point, which is that we all see different things. How much more boring life would be if it were otherwise!