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'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view, and robes the mountain in its azure hue. All of us are watchers - of television, of time clocks, of traffic on the freeway - but few are observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing. As a man is, so he sees. My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock, should find the time in my face. I keep six honest serving-men they taught me all I know; their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who, I rather like the world. The flesh is pleasing and the Devil does not trouble me. It is the theory that decides what can be observed. Mystery is not profoundness. The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there's a great difference in the beholders. The eyes are the window of the soul. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us. The eyes believe themselves; the ears believe other people. The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend. The things we see are the mind's best bet as to what is out front. You can observe a lot just by watching. The eye is the jewel of the body. The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition. The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul. To become the spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life. One must always tell what one sees. Above all, which is more difficult, one must always see what one sees. A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. Cultivated men and women who do not skim the cream of life, and are attached to the duties, yet escape the harsher blows, make acute and balanced observers. People only see what they are prepared to see. The lower classes of men, though they do not think it worthwhile to record what they perceive, nevertheless perceive everything that is worth noting; the difference between them and a man of learning often consists in nothing more than the latter's facility for expression. There's none so blind as those who won't see. |