Art for the Blind and The Lost Art of Seeing

The Mona Lisa is a piece of art for the blind. I laughed the whole time I was in the room with her, because everyone stared at her expression through their phone screen, trying to get the most crisp, zoomed-in photo imaginable; but no one looked at her. And there was even a line to walk quickly in front of her, a ritualized shuffle, and it made me sad that she was frozen as the most lauded and least looked-at piece of art in the most famous museum in the world. The Mona Lisa may be the least seen painting in existence.

I don’t know when we lost it, but we did. I met a man who used Strava as his only form of social media. He said even this was difficult, that having people know where he was made him uncomfortable. Being famous, he told me, was his greatest fear and his deepest trap. He hated texting, called it an endless conversation that felt pointless, and to this I agreed. I realized then that he had not lost it.

Perhaps what struck me most about him was not his aversion to technology, but his refusal to surrender to a life of constant noise. He guarded something most of us forget, the ability to move quietly through the world without always being observed, measured, or performed.

I last remember a period of unmeasured silence as my childhood. In these years, I saw a great many things that I assumed as fact. I thought, in my naivety, that animals only died of natural causes, that screaming was a reflex like sneezing, and that people always had good intentions. The concepts of killing, rage, and malice had no place in my heart and could not, I believed, be decisions that people made. And while I could see such things like clouds passing across the sky, they left no resonance within me.

Now resonance finds new meaning, because life is more than activity. Some see life as a challenge, others as a game. I feel it as resonance, that space where I become occupied and enamored, caught in the irises of a lover or between the syllables of a book. It is in that exhale that I find living. With this feeling, I could surmount Everest breathlessly or conquer faraway lands. Life, not signed and delivered but beckoned and besmirched. I search for this feeling, for life in tireless fashion and with every molecule in my body, and I understand that I see, or at least I hope I do.

The discipline of presence is seldom practiced. I watch people chase fleeting pleasure, applause, and attention from those they do not even like. This failure to honor one’s own core is a sign of rot to me, a consequence of quiet self-hatred, a refusal to sit with the self long enough to recognize its worth. And perhaps this is why so few can truly look at the Mona Lisa: not because they lack eyes, but because they lack stillness. Yet I don’t think the capacity is lost. I think any of us, at any moment, can choose to look again… to give the world, and each other, the gift of true viewership.