Seeing: Response

"It's all the matter of keeping my eyes open. Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children: Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot? Specialists can find the most incredibly well-hidden things."

I like what this section is saying, about looking for hidden things and looking harder for the things. It resonates with the rest of the piece, regarding the rest of the essay and parts of it about blind people, because seeing, for them, was work. It took effort, like a person who was deaf and then gets a cochlear implant. It takes effort to hear for the first time as an adult, as it does when you see for the first time. But, at the same time, it can work for people who have always seen. It can be work to actually see the world around you and not just let it go past you without really looking. People who can see take it for granted.

"When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find."

The beginning of the piece indicates wanting to hide something and have it found, and although it goes on to talk about seeing, it seems to end up being more about finding. Finding through seeing, and finding the beauty in things that you wouldn't have looked at more than once. A penny isn't something that most people would find wonder in, but to a child, it's great, because they don't know what money is worth to people who need to deal with it.

"I used to be able to see flying insects in the air. I'd look ahead and see, not the row of hemlocks across the road, but the air in front of it."

I love the way that she talks about her as a child focusing on the small things and looking not at the distance, but at something as insignificant as the air, and the small lives that affect people. I think that it adds to the effect the piece has to include this sentiment, and it's phrased beautifully.

"'Well, that's how things do look,' Joan answered. 'Everything looks flat with dark patches.'"

Even though it's dialogue from someone, this line stopped me in reading the story, because I felt that I had to sit and try and see it that way. I tried to stare at something and see it in two dimensions, but it didn't work. I love the addition of the way that Joan saw things after her sight was given to her through surgery.

"Why didn't someone hand those newly sighted people paints and brushes from the start, when they still didn't know what anything was? Then maybe we could all see color-patches too, the world unraveled from reason, Eden before Adam gave names. The scales would drop from my eyes; I'd see trees like men walking; I'd run down the road against all orders, hallooing and leaping."

There's a sense of jealousy here, that she didn't get to experience that altered sense of sight, look at things in the same way, and I think it's how I felt while I was reading about certain things in the essay. She's after something that's different from the rest of what the world sees, perhaps something special, and that altered sight might give that to her. It's a surreal image that she plants in your head, but it's still not enough to get you there.