'Seeing Means Going Over the Details'

Isaac Waisberg, the internet’s librarian-in-chief, has published two passages by Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951), the French proto-blogger better known as Alain. He was a professor of philosophy whose students included Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Both excerpts are taken from Alain on Happiness (1973), translated by Robert D. and Jane E. Cottrell. 

The first, “Travelling,” dated August 29, 1906, begins as a conventional criticism of tourism, thoughts that in the hands of another writer might reek of snobbery: “I do not quite understand them. When you see things on the run, they all look alike. A waterfall is still a waterfall. Thus someone who travels around at full speed is hardly richer in memories at the end than at the outset.”

 

Now it gets interesting: “The real richness of sights is in their details. Seeing means going over the details, stopping a little at each one, and then taking in the whole once again.” That’s my idea of travel, savoring the little things, not gawking at the Eiffel Tower. “To my mind,” Alain writes, “traveling means going a few feet, then stopping and looking to get a different view of the same things. Often, going to sit down a little to the right or to the left changes everything, and a lot more than going a hundred miles.” That’s more a philosophy of life, not travel. Alain reminds me of a well-known passage in Ruskin’s Modern Painters (Volume III, part IV, chapter XVI), published between 1843 and 1860:

 

“[T]he greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion,—all in one.”

 

That has applications to everything from visiting a museum to preparing soup (which I’m doing as I write), to diagnosing your kid’s sickness. Alain has an attractive commonsensical streak. In “Bucephalus,” dated December 8, 1922, he looks at our misguided understanding of human behavior, he writes:

 

“Impatience and ill humor sometimes result from the fact that a man has been on his feet too long. Do not try to reason him out of his ill humor; offer him a chair.”

 

Bill Vallicella, The Maverick Philosopher, has often written about Alain, most recently on “Alain on Monasticism.” See more translations of Alain’s propos here.