Training in Observation

Novels give us examples of keen observation, all the while teaching us by making us do the very activity it demonstrates. We learn to better observe by better observing

I’m teaching Fathers and Sons right now, as I have done for 18 consecutive springs. I believe this is my 20th time through Turgenev’s masterpiece. Like a long simmering sauce, the depth and body of this relatively short novel set in the Russian provinces just before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 has continued to instruct me and form me. I am not a scholar, nor an historian. My interests in the novel are purely literary, though the context is surely on purpose and aids in recognized the depth and nuance of this classic novel of manners.

Turgenev is a master of portraiture. I do not know of a finer master of observation. Paying attention to his finely rendered portraits has stretched my own powers of observation in ways that I was largely unaware of through my first dozen or so encounters. Though each year I notice something new, what I’ve come to understand is that I’ve really been trained by this novel to see, through repetition, the truths of things hiding in plain sight.

I have several mantra’s that I use in my classroom, and of late I’ve been obsessed with this seemingly simple one:

“What do you see? What do you hear?”

Upon first glance this double mantra seems so simple, so obvious, so pedestrian as to be almost not worth saying at all. But in our attentional landscape, because we are so overly inundated and saturated with visual and aural noise, it is a real challenge for us to be conscious of what we are and what we should be paying attention to.

A second mantra I use in class is this one:

“Poetry is on purpose.”

What I mean by this one is that there is some kind of intention or design in play, so that we can confidently assert that the magic of literature comes alive in and through the details. The power of the novel can only be fully realized (or closely approximated) by a reader who has unleashed their full potential as observers. The only way to unleash such power is by engaging in the very activity that you only do with serviceable competency. You have to do something poorly, first. Every first run through a novel will be a compromised experience, compromised because you have certain limits or governances on how much you can pay attention to at a time, where to exert your attentional resources, and what patterns you discern in the first foggy reading. It is imperfect. But as I tell my students, if you’ve ever watched a movie you like for a second time, something special clicks into place in ways that are thrilling. Since you already know what is going to happen, you can marshal your attention in other places and in other things. What you experience upon a second observation can often be shocking. You ask yourself: “how in the heck did I miss that the first time around?”

You may even wonder how it is that you even liked it the first time around as you observe (see & here) so much more a second or third time through. Novels are particularly powerful in this regard. They are the formators of keen observation. As we get further and further away from casual reading, opting to scroll instead of read I wonder what we lose in this exchange. In part we have to fight against those forces that rob us of long and slow observation instead of the short and quick monetizations of our shrinking attention spans. Novels are cheap. You don’t even really have to buy them if they are old enough or you have access to a library. Even at $25 it is an end purchase. The seller has no further options to purchase your eyeballs, no chance for an upsell, or another ad. Digital products are ephemeral, cheap, and infinitely malleable. You can repurpose a “short” on multiple platforms, with multiple overlays, with multiple means of hijacking attention.

Not so novels.