I have a favorite soft cushioned couch for an afternoon nap. I am on my back, neck tilted forward and open my eyes. I look through windows at the sky. I love to watch the clouds brushing against skyward straining branchlets of a red maple, denuded of its leaves. Branches are as tiny twigs stretching into the air. The tree makes its living fixing sunlight into molecules of sugar and pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Trees and neurons are dendritic, owing to their reach into apparent nothingness.
One afternoon I slept in a dreamy haze. The sky was filled with puffy pregnant cumulus clouds of all shapes and sizes tessellated in blue. On this windy temperate bright day sunshine burst through clouds. The heavenly panoply changed constantly. A distant small jet plane streaked through a blue break in the clouds, writing in the sky. Other planes flew softly in the distance as flocks birds flew across the sky. The window pane I gazed through was not more than 4 X4 feet looking diagonally to a southeast.
Half dozing I considered, what if I were made to stay here looking up at the sky able to do nothing else? I might be kidnapped by a gang of Mohametans, or chained here a prisoner or paralyzed having to lay and observe this tiny patch of sky for years or the rest of my life or I am a hero like the Count of Monte Cristo peeking through a tiny window and planning my escape. Should I be miserable or was there possibly enough to keep me occupied?
I thought the same once in an upper floor apartment on Singer Island overlooking the azure Atlantic or was it Caribbean Sea, near Palm Beach, Florida. Wave after wave crashed against a rocky shore and sprayed up in the air. I recorded the cycle of tides. In the distance I picked out ships and the gentle curve way out of infinity and there were sounds and waves. At night through this particular vantage that gave a much wider vista onto the world outside, I could see some stars and planets, principally Venus, and phases of the moon, earth, ocean and sky. When unlit by the moon or the occasional boat, the ocean was a black featureless abyss. I gazed into infinity.
But what if I should chain myself to my own comfortable sofa, assuming my basic needs were met, held a prisoner in my 4X4 foot vista to the stars what should I observe and would it be enough to keep my interest, what would I be able to learn?
Quite a bit it seemed to me. My couch with 4 X 4 foot window was a more ideal spaceship than was the ocean. The day and night would change. There would be the birds and squirrels and other animals. I could watch the leaves grow and drop, grow and drop. The amount of sky I could see would change over the seasons. Stars flow past over the night. I’d watch the procession of Apollo crossing the sky, and of constellations and planets and the moon by night and endless clouds and weather by day. I could chart these and write them down as stars changed over seasons throughout the year. I would notice a change in the tilt of the earth over the seasons manifest as the elevation of heavenly bodies and could chart and note from my little vista. asterisms and planets would change over a year only to return as the seasons did. I couldn’t say whether it might be better to describe any of these changes with words, to draw my impressions or simply to take pictures or film.
A book of pictures tracking the changes in this little patch of sky over time could be proof of how a narrow view would give an image of everything, the power of the inner image, the world is constructed through a pinhole as long as I had an inner vision to put it all together. As Walt Whitman saw the universe in a blade of grass, the same is my little patch of sky!
Like the blind men and the elephant you might wonder seeing so little of a thing as a few degrees of vision upon the entire sphere, I calculate 65 degrees at a distance of 4 feet from a window, of 360 degrees that is the sky, how much is it possible to know? I am limited in time as well to the remaining years of my own life. Yet from a small sample we draw vast conclusions. What you can learn from a little glimpse of a thing depends mostly on what you know already and what swath of the sky you happen to be looking at. Best to look south and have enough angular sweep to get an idea of the rising and setting of sun and planets and a good many stars. You can see the general westerly course of clouds. And you need understanding as well to contextualize new observations. The more you know the more your observations have meaning.
To know a thing, you need to form an inner picture of the whole. Though what you experience is limited, looking at a curved surface, the entire sweep of a curve all around you is easy to imagine. We are all of us in similar straits, one’s field of view is minuscule in the vastness of space and time. Even the most mobile of us and well travelled and educated see little of any consequence. We are fortunate to have knowledge and access to this information especially scientific data and principles and vast experience which our forebears and contemporaries wrested from nature. They were good enough to bequeath their observations and theories to us contributing to a picture of the whole. A thoughtful person must draw extensive conclusions on the basis of little information still will have the feeling of experiencing it all himself. Perhaps this is reason to imagine a Being above who sees and grasps it all.
The same is true about our fellow humans. We can only observe external behavior and appearance, over short periods of time. We are prone to hasty conclusions with little insight as to what happens in another person’s head. Having poor data it’s easy to draw unwarranted conclusions about another’s inner mental, intellectual, emotional life. Some deception is always part of human interaction which makes people hard to read.
What can you know about someone with cerebral palsy and intact mental development? I have been guilty of underestimating those with apparent disability. Limited ability may as well be a strength as well as a weakness. So called normality is an obstacle to thinking in great depth. It is the same phenomenon as my couch, looking up and out the window. From The Imitation Game movie “Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.” New electronic platforms will allow persons to overcome disabilities and express their inner machinations as never before like giving Stephen Hawking speech, all of which makes you wonder. Is our pinhole of limited gaze in space and time, curse or blessing?
