Reflections from the Archive
Three essays, written across the years, that kept finding their way back to the same image.
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There is a painting in this newsletter to which I have returned more often than I realized until I went looking. John William Waterhouse’s Echo and Narcissus, from 1903 — the boy stretched along the water, the nymph receding into the trees, the small lethal geometry of the scene.
I assumed, each time I used it, that I was making a fresh point. I now see, rereading three of the essays in sequence, that they were arguing with each other about the same problem.
That problem, roughly, is that the things we look at most attentively are usually the wrong things, and that the discipline of looking better is harder than the discipline of looking more. Ovid knew this. So did Kierkegaard, who shows up in two of the three pieces below without my having planned it.
But the points raised are much more relevant and modern than indicated by the names of old poets and philosophers…
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