Who Can See Anything For What It Actually Is

I was talking to someone recently and realized that I was having a hard time describing a building that I wanted to tell them about. “It’s tall, and it has these things on it,” I said. It reminded me of all the other times I’ve tried to describe buildings and how hard it is, which is weird, because some would say I’m a professional building describer. Except I’m not, really. I’m a professional building interpreter.

Does it matter what something looks like? I think the question is: can we tell what something actually looks like? Maybe this is sort of philosophy 101 — is your red my red? — but I think we often have no idea what something looks like because absolutely everything we see is filtered through some kind of lens. Sometimes I take my students outside to look at a building, and I ask them to tell me what they see. They say things like “power” and “knowledge” and “California,” and I say no, really, what do you see, and then eventually they say things like “three windows” and “a big door,” but doesn’t it tell you something that it takes half an hour of coaching t…