Peripheral Visions

topic of perception, I knew that my problem was simpler than that of the princess in the story, for I needed only ask the people sitting in the nave to turn around (this is itself an unusual experience, for children are often told it is improper to turn around in church) and to see the blue of that time and place, a different blue from the bright tiled domes of mosques in Iran but equally the work of worshipful human hands. What does it mean to take that experience and say that it is a complex matter of brain cells and nerve endings leading to an image constructed in the brain? We are all trained to sprinkle sentences like these with disparaging adverbs: only, just, no more than. What you see there is not an epiphany, we might say, it is no more than an illusion, a mere construction of brain chemistry. I thought I saw the eye of God, I might say, peering down on the sanctuary, but it was only a trick of iconography. This is one kind of loss. There is a different kind of loss in saying that the experience may be different for every individual in the church. But it could still be true to say it is the eye of God.
    The descriptions are all true. Taken together they offer enrichment, not loss. The problem lies in those modifiers that seem to diminish the experience. In fact they make it more important. First, in the revelation of the intricacy of the human mind, how wonderfully we are made, so that the artifacts of glaziers and the artifacts of neurons are joined to—rather than contrasted with—the wonders of nature. Then, in the realization that what we see is there only by virtue of our individual seeing. It can never be true that “every prospect pleases and only man is vile,” for it is the human eye that responds to each pleasing prospect, that knows and creates the pleasures we call blue, yellow, red, green from the physical phenomena. In the congregation children and adults, women and men, from the immense polyglot crowd that moves through New York City, are all constructing their visions in the intricate flesh of their brains, none of them exactly the same.
    We have no way of knowing whether any comparable experience of beauty exists for any other organism, although we can test the sensory range of other animals and know that it varies from species to species. We can wonder at the constructions of the bowerbird, but we cannot admire them as does his mate. We can match the colors of a coral reef with those of the fish swimming above it, and know they belong to a single composition, but our delight is private. Like other species, we have our own genetically determined blindnesses, captivity within our portion of the spectrum, unlike insects and snakes, whose sensory systems escape at either end. Many errors must arise from phylogenetic limits on perception, but even more from those we have learned to impose.
    It is true that human actions dirty the sky and the rivers, but human vision creates unique versions of their beauty. This in turn represents a responsibility, for the visions in our minds are transient. It is all too easy to forget what the woods were like when they were full of birds. Even as we try to reduce the material pollution of the air, we need to retain untarnished the vision that makes the sky beautiful. If you sit with a child, looking at the sky, you can propose the endless possibilities in the clouds, saying, Look, I see an old woman, I see a rabbit, I see a tree. A child will respond with visions you have not seen; children walk among strangers and find new Edens among the trees and animals and people of everyday life.
    The responsive eye enlivens the vista to which it responds; the play of imagination is one way of enriching and conserving the natural world. There is a story told about J. B. S. Haldane, the great British evolutionist, who was asked what, on the basis of his knowledge of the creation, he could infer about the mind of the Creator. His answer was perhaps a joke but surely a revealing one, “an inordinate fondness for beetles,” he said. The patterns on the carapaces of the earth’s multitude of beetles, thousands of species still undescribed and many threatened with extinction, are also epiphanies. A Swiss painter, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, moved from painting their blazonry to the discovery of unrecognized genetic damage near nuclear plants. The eye of compassion is as rare and valuable as the beings for which that compassion is felt. Its sensitivities depend on picking