Burroughs: ‘The Art of Seeing Things’

 John Burroughs, the star of the nine-minute film mentioned yesterday, wrote an essay on “The Art of Seeing Things.”

It’s a subject I want to know more about.

Imagine two people walking along the creek. One notices that aquatic flies are hatching and sees swallows feasting on them. He notices that three species of plants have just started flowering, including one he doesn’t know. He’s intrigued. The other fellow is just along for the walk. He notices nothing and, somewhere along the way, he stopped trying to notice things. He’s bored.

It’s the story of two different kinds of life — one rich, one impoverished. The difference in wealth can’t be measured in dollars, but it’s real.

This is not just about noticing the natural world. Some people can plod through a work of literature without noticing anything remarkable. Others can live in a world rich in art and music without wanting to see or hear any of it.

The value in education, it seems to me, has nothing to do with a career. An education is a chance to choose and cultivate the kind of life that sees and notices things.

Some wonderful writers have talked about this art of seeing things. I think Guy Davenport’s essay “Finding” might be the best.

Burroughs’s essay is worth reading for several reasons. Long after Burroughs died, Wittgenstein got at the distinction between what can be said and what can be shown.

It seems to me that Burroughs is at his best in showing us what it is to notice. He describes watching a newly emerged moth trying to find a place to unfold its wings before they dry and harden in the air. He investigates a mining bee (in genus Andrena) that burrows into the ground. He’s the kind of fellow who carries a trowel in his pocket.

You get a sense of what the art is by witnessing examples of it, rather than hearing a scientific explanation of it. Burroughs is good at showing.

• Sources: John Burroughs, “The Art of Seeing,” is in American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau; The Library of America, 2008, pp. 145-59. I found it in Library of America’s Story of the Week. Davenport’s account is in his essay “Finding.” It's in Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination; San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. You can find a note of it at “Davenport’s search for arrowheads” on March 15, 2022.  For more on a different kind of wealth, see “A pleasure that’s a kind of wealth,” Aug. 19, 2022.