Gregoire Alexandre – [←] Fer 1 (2012); [→] Fer 2 (2012)

You attend to the shape, sometimes by tracing it, sometimes by screwing up your eyes so as not to see the colour clearly, and in many other ways. I want to say: This is the sort of thing that happens while one ‘directs one’s attention to this or that’. But it isn’t these things by themselves that make us say someone is attending to the shape, the colour, and so on. Just as a move in chess doesn’t consist simply in moving a piece in such-and-such a way on the board-nor yet in one’s thoughts and feelings as one makes the move: but in the circumstances that we call “playing a game of chess”, “solving a ches problem”, and so on.

                –Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §33

We don’t know what’s
going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of
matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of
typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same
typewriters, that they ignite? We don’t know. Our life is a faint
tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf
miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look
at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on
here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling
band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.
                  

                —Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek