Philip Sugg | Blog

Nov 3 2025

Seeing: Past, Present, Future

A continuation of the previous post on the hummingbird. In the weeks since it flew away, the question that keeps occurring to me is some version of this: “Why did I see it? Why did this one flight back to the nest catch my eye?” This bird, hardly larger than a flying insect, could have kept sitting there, invisible in its stillness, for weeks. How many other lifecycles have passed unknown while I was looking right at them? This is surely what happens, many times over, for countless other events that are equally worthy. For a busy person, failing to see might as well be identical with seeing itself. I have to admit that my default powers of seeing are ordinary at best: too purpose-driven, insensitive enough to make me efficient. I can do better if I try, but I rarely give myself the chance.

But even the unobservant see things–startling things, even, that can completely change a life. It’s a question that has a long history: why does what is subtle and rare still break through, even with those who are busy, distracted, and chronically unobservant? Sight has never been fair. These reports–of those who were unfairly gifted a vision–are a form of compensation for those of us who miss most things.¹

Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: it’s one of those unclassifiable books, written by a naturalist with a spiritual appetite that has nowhere to go. She writes about the woods around her home in the Southeast US, near Roanoke, Virginia. I don’t remember why I found it worthy of reading in the early 2000s, in high school. The book came out in 1974, and won the Pulitzer Prize the next year. Maybe I took to it because she wrote from such an ordinary geographic place: neither well-preserved nor particularly wild, at best moderately scenic, not far from where I grew up in North Carolina².

I am thinking of a well-known chapter of that book, “Seeing,” that was written in winter, when Dillard was planning out her investigations for the spring. She’s surrounded herself with reference material about what she wants to study next: insects, aquatic life, grasses, sedges, and other ordinary hidden worlds of the Virginia mountains. She realizes that her ability to see these specimens firsthand, directly in the field, is limited. Earlier in life she could once pick out the “flying insects in the air,” but no longer. The power to see is hard won and easily lost. She considers the scientist, her superior in seeing one small part of nature: “I don’t see what the specialist sees, and so I cut myself off, not only from the total picture, but from the various forms of happiness.” In nature there is rarely a warning: there is nothing, until there is something, after which there is nothing again: “a fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt.”

Dillard reviews how each trace of being requires its own way of seeing: light waves from the sun that fall outside the visible spectrum, small birds emerging spontaneously from behind the leaves of a single tree, flows of microscopic dust that track the body of the wind–some of these are beyond direct human observation, all require effort and care. Amidst these layers of wonders, how does one decide where–more important, how–to look?

I want to see more of everything, but I also want to see what is essential. Maybe I go outside and find some weed growing in a crack of the sidewalk. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that one before–I certainly don’t know its name. Soon it feels like a broader failing: how much do I know–how much do I not know–about what is growing in just one block around me? I’ve had a version of this thought before, and it has led me to consult the closest plausible reference: books for weeds, for wildflowers, for stars and whatever else grows out of the ground in Chicago or appears in its sky (there are apps for that, too, of course). I read for the broad categories, I try to to match the living thing in front of me with the reference. With time, I recognize new specimens. The abstraction that I have only so far seen in books or pictures becomes something real. It is thrilling to realize that you are learning to see–seeing not just individual things but new classes and types. When I see like this, I miss everything else outside of the type; but I do not care because my time is filled with what is new, with the doubt of looking and the pleasure of finding.

Judging by the essay, Dillard spent some time in her years at Tinker Creek learning to see like I describe: by dipping into the knowledge of experts, accepting their schemas, learning to feel out models in the field until they yielded results. You have to start somewhere; if you start right away with seeing, by just going out and looking, you won’t get anywhere recognizable–certainly not a place easy to describe. But starting from nothing, ending somewhere almost indescribable–certainly somewhere disorganized, even wild–this is also where Dillard goes:

Galileo thought that comets were an optical illusion. This is fertile ground: since we are certain that they’re not, we can look at what scientists are saying with fresh hope. What if there are really gleaming castellated cities hung upside-down over the desert sand? What limpid lakes and cool date palms have our caravans passed untried? Until, one by one, by the blindest of leaps, we light on the road to these places, we must stumble in darkness and hunger.

The scientist misses out, but hopes to be more than compensated by the specific detail that they need to answer a question. Dillard, the committed amateur, is no less exuberant but less sure about the trade-off.

Yes, with the help of teachers or references, we learn to walk along the defined tracks–but what about seeing outside of the frame? What is the nature of these things that are seen, even if they are not sought? Can they be sought? If humans were only intentional creatures, driven by what they had been taught to search for and what they needed to find, there would be nothing more to say here. But that is not how it works. Call it the “burning bush” problem. From Exodus:

Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight-why the bush does not burn up.”

In the mythos of the Bible, the bush was a sign from God. But it still had to be seen. The passage does not tell us if Moses was the first or fortieth person to walk across the strange bush that kept burning. If a sight is seen but not noticed, is it seen at all? Moses was the first in the area to take notice, to walk over and look.

New things happen all the time, but there must be an openness to new things that makes it possible for them to enter the field of view. It is possible in theory with any sense organ (e.g., the Proustian madeleine). Still, the richest chronicle of examples is probably in the visual field.

Now we are getting into mystical territory: seeing that flouts expectation, slipping past the filters that should have sifted it out. Can this be trained? Maybe. This type of seeing may be less a skill than a form of synchronization with some wider set of processes in the environment. Seeing becomes a proxy, a manifestation of moving alongside this larger something. And those who put themselves out in the world–like Dillard did in the forest tract around Tinker Creek–are more likely to run into whatever new views there are to be had. The more novel and emergent the experience, the less the observer can take full credit. I believe more people than one would first believe have the capacity–but not the opportunity–to see in this way.

Dillard spends most of the chapter circling around this form of seeing that is a letting go, wondering aloud how to describe or analogize it. She lands on a 1932 book by Marius von Senden, Space and Sight, that collects case studies of medical patients (often, cataracts) who were blind for the first part of life, until pioneering medical procedures gave them useful vision. The experience of first sight is normally reserved for infants, whose newfound senses–whatever they are–are ultimately unknowable to both first-person accounts and (so far) scientific measurement. The miraculous occurrence here is learning to see while having the power to speak.

The reported experience of the newly-sighted becomes Dillard’s model for learning to see without conceptual prejudice: “pure sensation unencumbered by meaning,” where “form, distance and size were so many meaningless syllables.” This is her authentic counterpart to ordinary vision, a superpower too overwhelming to be gifted for long.³ From the standpoint of a person who has always possessed “normal” vision, the patients report all manner of scrambled intuitions about the visual field, struggling with perspective, object permanence, and other concepts usually mastered before the age of two. But Dillard comes back to one episode, a newly-sighted girl who is overwhelmed by the beauty of a sunshine-sprinkled tree that shakes in the wind, the “tree with lights in it.” She writes:

It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

The breakthrough that Dillard describes is so fierce and moving that it ends the essay; the reader, too, is tempted to leave it in the realm of boundary experiences, to stop at the point of gratitude to Dillard for bringing back some communicable scraps of her vision in writing. What she calls her “pearl of great price” is also a type of seeing that the essay lifts up as the ultimate prize: as fresh as the landscape seen by the first creature who ever saw in color, too strange to make ever make sense–and not obligated to try. Science and method are, here, a means to an end for Dillard.

It has been more fifty years since Tinker Creek was published, and I am torn about whether what Dillard describes is still generally recognizable–or now so rare and incomprehensible, to the point of making her sound insane. Ask Gen Z, I guess; as a millenial who was lucky enough to come up in the last days of an immersive print culture (and who embraced it), I am probably not the best person to ask. This essay is a time capsule from the other side of the attentional gulf, when not just the internet and social media but any type of networked screen was barely a rival to experiences like this. Dillard didn’t just write Pilgrim at Tinker Creek–it was a bestseller. A mainstream audience existed for her style of long-form transcendentalism. What are the prospects for that in 2025?⁴

Much of what makes modern media so absorptive is that it attempts to offer a spiritual substitute, a shortcut to the hyper-seeing that Dillard describes.⁵ The technology of the screen itself looks like a hypnotic simulation of the arresting vision: one doesn’t look at a screen but see through it, as if what is on the screen were surrounded by some kind of halo. Children are the people who, as a category, are capable of taking an interest in almost anything; put a screen in front of them and they stop and stare–as if this is what they had been searching for all along. It is not a judgment on parents to say that a child captured by a screen does inspire a kind of revulsion (I think this about my own), as if the most precious form of attention were being funnelled off into the trash.

Maybe more of us could use the transformative views of the type that Dillard describes: sought but not found, welcomed whenever they happen. But this is the problem: you can’t script it. The ecstatic vision of the saints might unfold in the eyes of the saints–or they could strike the undeserving sinners. Either way, they’re not a program for anything. If we are to see anything out of the ordinary, what we need is not to force the extraordinary thing, but to clear the field from unnecessary diversions. Dillard considers the scientific approach to seeing but moves on because it is not available to her. Science is a set of practices that require membership. But she, also, proceeds with her own kind of method. She reads and studies and has a plan and, however haphazard, goes out to Tinker Creek every day to move forward on it.

I have this thought, which I can’t yet complete, that there is a middle zone of attention that needs make a comeback. Not as professional or as obligated to results as that of the scientist, but far more deliberate and for-itself than the average naturalist in 2025, who goes out to capture pictures and posts and “proof that it happened.” We need more strange plans, haphazard plans, thoroughly amateur plans like those Annie Dillard used on Tinker Creek. What will the artifacts be, how will I communicate what I saw? That hasn’t been decided yet. I am likely to be bored, but it is also the most promising route to being surprised.

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