vox philosophorum IV: Seeing and Being Seen
On the beauty of what cannot be fully known
“Det er ganske sandt, hvad Philosophien siger, at Livet maa forstaaes baglaends. Men derover glemmer man den anden Saetning, at det maa leves forlaends. Hvilken Saetning, jo meer den gjennemtaenkes, netop ender med, at Livet aldrig ret bliver forstaaeligt.”
“It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life cannot really ever be fully understood.”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Journalen, JJ 167
What happens if someone sees you?
Not merely passing in the opposite direction,
or that brief mutual glance on the street
that makes your body tingle —
but sees you.
Not your skin, nor the color of your eyes,
nor the practiced smile,
but you. Into you.
Have you ever been seen?
Made naked by a stranger?
The sudden realization that this new person knows you,
perceives a still point at the heart of you —
but knows not yet your name.
It took only one glance.
Sometimes the lightning strikes on both sides,
in the same instant.
Then the magnetic pull
cannot be overcome.
It’s beautiful.
This power runs through all of us.
You have the gift of in-sight too —
I know that it has wielded you before,
no less than twice or thrice.
I often wonder what people have seen in me.
I am not easy. I am hidden away.
Each layer of my being contains a lock without a key.
I know not where they are.
I welcome you to try.
You’d see a part of me, but never all:
a color, a shape,
an idea,
a deeply held feeling or belief —
glimmers of myself that ripple into your light,
only to vanish from your view.
I am not insecure. I am not delicate.
I am not secretive, nor shifty.
Ask, and I will answer—truthfully,
and likely far more deeply than you expected.
But the answers to your questions won’t release the locks.
Nothing wholly opens. Nothing is fully revealed.
It cannot be.
It is not possible to say all there is about oneself,
nor all we realize of each other.
We share what we can.
Sometimes we pay dearly for sharing our vulnerabilities.
But we can never share it all.
That is why we’re locked
in ways that cannot be broken
or unlocked;
why nothing is ever fully disclosed;
why we are — and remain — a mystery,
to each other and to ourselves.
And this is part — only a part — of what makes life beautiful:
we share even as we hide,
protect even as we expose,
reveal even as we conceal and cover over.
We remember and forget.
Look back as we move forward.
We learn as we unlearn.
It is why we live.
For either we are living, or we are not.
We cannot hold both life and death at once.
There is no middle ground.
We fight to stay protected from the end,
and so defend ourselves until the end —
with every breath, until we stop.
For only then are we unlocked.
And only then are we not.