Seeing the Nothing

"Seeing the nothing, seeing what is not in the landscape, empowers the explorer, because discerning what is not in the picture enables the explorer to make connections. The explorer who slows down or stops for a few moments to look around, to catalog what appears to be absent, becomes the connoisseur of noticing. Most people look around and see thing. The explorer looks around and sees the patterns and revelations disclosed by things absent."

"Outdoors, away from things experts have already explained, the slightly thoughtful person willing to look around carefully for a few minutes, to scrutinize things about which he or she knows nothing in particular, begins to be aware, to notice, to explore. And almost always, that person starts to understand, to see great cultural and social and economic and political patterns unnoticed by journalists and other experts. In that understanding may come a desire to cry out, to tell friends or family or total strangers about discoveries great and small, but the understanding may just as well produce secrecy, a quiet smile, a satisfied nod. Whatever else that understanding of exploration, of discovery, brings, it brings a specialness, a near magic to the explorer that attracts other people who want to know what is so worth looking at."

from "Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places" by John R. Stilgoe

The Point

"You are born into a society and you are shaped by it, whether you know it or not, or whether you like it or not. Each of us is born into a prison of received opinion, superstitions, and of prejudices. Now one of the functions of art is to try and define the prison. A) The artist must know they are in it, and many of them don’t know they are in it and those are the bad artists; they don’t see past those bars. The prison is going to break you eventually but you can at least get a look out, and it is the look out that is art. Try to see the thing whole is what we all want and why we write. There is no purpose to life or point to life other than what you invest by in yourself by your own actions. The making of a book or music or your own creation is to try to hold the moment and give it a certain order and bring order out of chaos and say 'here it is, seen whole, even though of course it really isn’t.'”
-Gore Vidal

Truth

"It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed up with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for the truth even though it is beyond our reach."
- Karl Popper