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 to get them to factually describe what it looks like?

I don’t think it matters what anything looks like because nothing looks like anything because who can see anything for what it actually is? What matters is what we see when we look at something and how well we can articulate that. That tall building with the things on it made me think about hope, so that’s what it looks like.