Before I read this book, I thought Aldous Huxley was one man. I thought he was the man who wrote Brave New World in 1932 and The Doors of Perception in 1954, and that the gap between them was the long quiet middle of a serious English novelist gradually becoming an American psychedelic. That was the Huxley anyone who read around him in college would have ended up with. A Wikipedia-shaped Huxley.
Then I found The Art of Seeing, published 1942, shelved in a used bookstore between two books about gardening, priced at three dollars, and I learned that the middle of Huxley’s life was not quiet. It was obsessed with his own eyes.
Huxley had bad eyes from the age of sixteen. A case of keratitis punctata in 1910 left him legally blind for eighteen months and with permanent scarring and distorted vision for the rest of his life. He wore thick corrective lenses. He read, for most of his career, with one eye, through a magnifying glass, inches from the page. He could not drive. He could not easily find his way in a room he didn’t know. He wrote twelve novels and dozens of essays anyway. He did it by will.
The Art of Seeing is the book he wrote about what happened when he met Margaret Corbett, a teacher of the Bates Method — a controversial system, invented by American ophthalmologist William Bates, that claimed you could improve functional vision through exercises, attention, relaxation, and something Bates called central fixation. Huxley tried it. He reported that, over two and a half years, his functional vision improved dramatically — to the point that he could, with effort, read without glasses. Ophthalmologists hated the book. Many still do. The scientific case for the Bates Method remains, to put it generously, unsettled.
That is not what I want to talk about.
Before I read this book, I had never thought about the distinction between eyesight and seeing. Huxley’s argument, which he builds across fifteen careful chapters, is that vision is not a passive reception of photons. It is an active, trained, continuous collaboration between the eye, the nervous system, the attention, and the mind’s theory of what the eye is looking at. You do not see what is in front of you. You see what your mind has learned to expect, corrected in real time by what your eye happens to notice. If your attention collapses, your vision collapses with it. If your attention fragments, you see fragments.
I did not have the language for this idea. I had experiences of it. I had been in places — a courtyard in Sefrou late in the day, a room in Honolulu with afternoon light coming through the jalousies — where I suddenly saw what had been in front of me all along, and I had always chalked it up to mood. Huxley tells you it is not mood. It is attention. Attention is a muscle. Attention can be trained. Attention can also atrophy.
I read this book and stopped reading for a week. I sat and looked at things. A wall. A row of books. A kettle. I tried to see them the way Huxley said his teachers had taught him — centrally, meaning letting the fovea rest on one point at a time, with the periphery soft; and mobilely, meaning letting the eye move rather than fixate. For the first three days, it gave me a headache. On the fourth day, the headache resolved into something I had not expected, which was a gentler way of being in a room. My eyes were not trying to hold everything at once. They were permitted to land and lift and land again.
I cannot tell you whether Huxley’s method improved my functional vision. I have no way to measure it. I can tell you that it changed the pace of my reading. I read slower now. I stop to look up more often. I notice I have been reading a page without seeing the page, and I put the book down until the eye comes back.
That is what this book gave me. Not a cure. A pace.
A related thread on vagobond.com: Around the World Through a Photographer’s Lens — China — a piece about what it means to actually see a place instead of photograph-and-move-on.
The philosophical framework that started forming for me out of this kind of reading I’ve been calling Baoism. Bao Ji — Bring Your Own. Attention is one of the things you bring.
Readers and fans of The Art of Seeing will really enjoy Liminal Travel: The Spaces In Between — my travel book for people who suspect that the way we usually travel is a way of not-seeing, and who want a different pace. Includes a chapter on Baoism. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
