What Do We See?

There’s an e-mail going around about Gene Weingarten’s Washington Post article published Sunday, April 8, 2007 on page W10. The article garnered Weingarten a Pulitzer. The article is not short, but well worth reading as a whole.

The link above not only contains that prize-winning article, but a short clip of a performance that "... was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?" The beauty was the playing of a priceless violin by one of the world’s greatest artists, in a public place.

Weingarten described the beauty, certainly in a prize-winning style: "... in this musician's masterly hands, it sobbed and laughed and sang -- ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring, flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal, sumptuous." Each of his words evokes pictures in our minds that apply to our own lives. Places we’ve been or pictures we’ve seen. We see the beauty in his descriptions that are reflections in our lives – because we’ve read those words above.

The experiment? Weingarten describes the reaction of people moving through their daily routines. Originally, there was the expectation of a crowd. The amount garnered was forecast to be $150. As Weingarten states, “… there was never a crowd, not even for a second.”

Instead, what we see is "... a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity."

We have more leisure than any time in mankind’s past. W. H. Davies did not live to see it, but may have seen the future coming, when he wrote Leisure:

WHAT is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

How can we follow God’s command to love thy neighbour as thyself (Matthew 22:39b KJV) when we cannot see our neighbor as we move through life?

How can we follow God’s command to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself (Luke 10:27b KJV) when we cannot see our God as we move through life?

Take time to stand, stare and Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD. (Psalms 27:14 KJV)