Adam and Eve Leave Eden (1973), by American folk artist John William Dey. Image: Smithsonian American Art Museum/Art Resource

Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in us, and the only extreme attention is religious.
—Simone Weil

A friend who’s a psychotherapist once told me she thought the foremost reason that people marry was not loneliness or lust or security. Rather, they yearn to be fully known by a husband or wife and to share in the intimate gift of fully knowing another.

We seek a deep and perceptive insight into ourselves that we can only get through intimacy with another, and we read fictional narratives and memoirs for just that reason. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then we shall see face to face: now I know only in part; but then shall I know fully even as I have been fully known,” St. Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth. We have in front of us guises, personae, and outward appearances. We yearn for the secret life of our times. We yearn to “see face to face.”

I researched the physiology of sight and found that only in the most limited way do our eyes function like cameras. Right behind the iris and pupil is a lens that focuses images, upside down, onto the retina at the rear of the eye. There is the equivalent of an exposure setting at work so that we can note fine details in enough sunshine, and at night gradually adjust to the darkness and fuzzily recognize shapes, but not in color. Like cameras we can change the focal length of the lenses by squeezing or widening the internal optics. We have no shutters, of course. We do not lock onto an image. We scan it. Even when we presume we’re staring and the image is fixed, we’re actually shifting our focus so that varying measures of light will hit the retina and cause it to zap signals along the optic nerve into the brain, refreshing and updating the image at such great speed that we perceive our vision as seamless. When we speak of seeing, we’re speaking of the hard mental activity of decoding, for we see through pattern recognition. We collect nuanced notes about edges, shapes, colors, and motion, and we work at interpreting them, at recognizing what’s right in front of us, a mental process that uses up an estimated 40 percent of our at-rest caloric consumption.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), Annie Dillard noted the experiences of those Western surgeons who first performed cataract operations on the blind. Doctors found that patients who could recognize and name forms such as a cube or sphere with their hands or tongues could not relate that tactile information to what was held in front of them when they finally could see. A girl recorded the sensations all infants must have, of registering nothing but many patches of brightness. Another patient reported that he now saw only a field of light, “in which everything appeared dull, confused, and in motion.”

Distances were puzzling. Thomas Aquinas once stated that we are born with the faculty to recognize that the sun is not the size of an orange, but this seems not to be the case. We each learn that skill as babies, by grabbing some things near at hand while failing to do so with whatever is far away. For the grownups whose eyes were operated on, everything had seemed closer, their houses cozier, when they were blind. A world static and small when they were non-seeing was suddenly overwhelming in its chaos and size.

Some postoperative grownups became humiliatingly aware that they had been visible always and that their privacy had been invaded over the years by anyone who looked in their direction. Some preferred to shut their eyes at home in order to walk about in their old way. Doctors noticed a loss of serenity as the newly sighted now groomed themselves, envied others, sought false and misleading appearances, even lied and stole.

But there were others among the newly sighted who were agreeably stunned by the variety and richness of the world, one girl recording her astonishment that each person she looked at had a recognizably different face. Another could only gasp, “Oh God! How beautiful!”

Dillard notes that we see “within the range of only about 30 percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me.”

I owned a cat named Skeezix that would stare with fascination at nothing at all, insofar as I could tell, but perhaps Skeezix was seeing some of that 70 percent of “whatever” that was unavailable to me. I have no idea what I’m missing in those colors I am unable to discern, but the quest to see ever more seems a characteristic human trait. We are predatory in that way. And as biologist Bruce Boff has pointed out, “Colors do not exist in the material world. Photons of different wavelengths do.” An immaterial mind, or consciousness, or soul “converts what-ever happens physically in the brain into our perceptions, including color.”

In a journal entry by the 19th-century British Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, the writer famously noted that “what you look hard at seems to look hard at you.”

Hopkins probably got that notion via the Oxford University art historian John Ruskin, whose 1857 handbook The Elements of Drawing was a bestseller in England when Hopkins was a schoolboy and which inspired Gerard’s enthusiasm for recording the natural world.

Just as 19th-century science had acquired the habit of classifying, closely watching, and exactingly recording the attributes and activities of flora and fauna, so Ruskin urged those who would be educated to find the grand significance in even seemingly inconsequential and transitory realities.

In The Poem as Sacrament (2000), Philip Ballinger maintains that Ruskin “approached the theological in his belief that only an impartial, intense, and fearless seeing leads to ‘noble emotion’ which in turn leads to a revelation of nature as God’s work,” his “holy book.” Ruskin held that “all great art is praise” and that faithful observation of the facts of existence would result in fresh disclosures of the Holy Being.

Hopkins seems to have written no poetry that counted from 1867, when he graduated from Oxford University, to December 1875, when the tragic loss at sea of five nuns exiled from Germany inspired him to compose “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” But in those eight years of elected silence, Hopkins was journaling about a natural world that he observed with reverence, just as Ruskin recommended.

This is from his journal of a vacation on the Isle of Man in August 1872: “Again to Port Soderick. This time it was a beautiful day. I looked down from the cliffs at the sea breaking on the rocks at high-water of a spring tide—first, say, it is an install of green marble knotted with ragged white, then fields of white lather, the comb of the wave richly clustered and crisped in breaking, then it is broken small and so unfolding till it runs in threads and thrums twitching down the backdraught to the sea again.” In another entry, he describes “one little square house cushioned up in a thatched grove of green like a man with an earache.”

In his journals and in his poetry, Hopkins saw into the middle of things. Seeing gave rise to feeling, and closely observed actualities gave rise to religious emotion, as in his famous hymn to creation, “Pied Beauty”:

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Seeing is relational. Jewish philosopher Martin Buber would explore that idea in his classic I and Thou (1923), in which he pictured a tree as a pillar with flowing green leaves in a flood of light, a species in “infinite commerce with earth and air.”

Buber wrote, “Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition. But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me . . . The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it—only differently. One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: Relation is reciprocity.”

Relation and reciprocity are features of all our contacts with the arts. We view or read or hear and our first step is generally acceptance, welcoming any presence of beauty, willing to be moved, hoping for the best, which is friendship with the piece. Our secondary impulse is evaluation. Early humans needed to conjure decisions on the basis of hunger and fear, to conjure if what they saw was food or a predator and if they should fight or flee. There is still a vital presence of friend or foe in our encounters, but now, with art, we are judging whether it dangerously opposes our values and attitudes or is just something we can comfortably ignore. And the third step is often that of self-inquiry—examination of conscience, if you will. Why did I react that way? Was I fair? How was I delighted or offended? Seeing—that is, intelligent sensing—is always transactional.

I have had the experience of picking up a book, reading a few pages, and loathing it. And then just a few years later, giving it another chance and wondering just what it was I so disliked earlier. Each page now seems touched with genius.

And there is a corollary experience of recollecting a gorgeous passage in a book, hunting for it, and finding it isn’t there; I have fantasized it. We are co-creators of the works of art we view or hear or read. I have had people recite to me quotations from my books, and there’s frequently a word or phrase that’s just plain wrong. And I generally find that a good thing, because it demonstrates that their own equally creative imagination was engaged: that they read what was on the page, but took away what was changed but meaningful to them.

Ingmar Bergman’s film adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute begins with an overture during which the camera simply roams over the faces of expectant people in an opera audience. We, as an audience ourselves, have no place to go, so we watch the faces as the overture plays, and we find in our attentiveness, in Bergman’s attentiveness, that all those faces are interesting. Mozart’s music, their rapt expressions, and even the peculiarities and flaws of physiognomy united in a harmony, call it a chord, that included those of us in the movie theater seats, and I recall feeling happiness, a joy in community. And I realized I needed to look closer at the world.

Simone Weil wrote, “Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.” She meant there was a holiness, whose expression was joy and sympathy and self-giving, for those who have not just focused on but related to a person, an object, or an idea.

A final story about seeing: In Genesis, right after Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves.” God calls out, “Where are you?” and Adam seemingly skulks from behind the scenery and into view, squeamishly replying, “I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.”

In the sly, funny, insightful way of folk art, the birth of human self-consciousness is here displayed, and the fruitless efforts at escape from our all-seeing God is given its origin. Adam has the temerity to be truthful at first, but he almost immediately shirks from responsibility, coldly identifying Eve as “the woman whom you gave to be with me,” and ratting her out as the initiator of their sin.

I find the rest of the fable, in which a wrathful God evicts Adam and Eve from paradise and condemns them to labor and pain, far less interesting than the first part of the story and its expression of the psychological reality that the Spirit of God frequently calls out to us: “Where are you?” It’s still a human tendency to hide or avoid contact with God, feel ashamed, claim no responsibility for our lives and sins, assuming that he congratulates us on our successes but would just as soon not see us in our ugliness, pettiness, weakness.

To overlook means both to view from on high, in panorama, and to forgive or ignore indulgently. The gift of the arts, whether narrative or representative is similarly doubled. First, the arts overlook our lives just as God does, giving us a sense of overview and a welcome and generous attention to our elations, our fears, our sins, our yearnings, and our plights. Second, the arts allow us to let us see others in their most unprotected moments, the moments in which they are fallow ground, ready to be cultivated or not, under our watchful and caring eyes.

Ron Hansen is the author of A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction (2001) and eight novels, including Exiles (2008). His essay is drawn from a talk delivered on April 15 in the Heights Room, sponsored by the Church in the 21st Century Center.