Looking at Hard Things

Alone, I discovered myself looking hard at things, as if I were seeing them for the first time or seeing them properly for the first time.  I wondered if solitude promoted this activity, or whether it was a result of having more time for everything, more time to look and see, more to concentrate on what I was seeing.

        I was interested in the question because so often in the past I had thought it preferable to be accompanied to the theater, to the opera, to the ballet, on travels and vacations.  I had thought that there was a value to having someone along to “share” (how I have come to hate the flat, soft sentimental sound of that word) the experience, but I began to see…a greater value lay in hearing and seeing from within that mysterious inner place, where the eyes and ears of the mind are insulated from the need to communicate to someone else what I experienced.  The energy necessary to express myself to someone else seemed to have been conserved for the harder look, the keener hearing.”                                                                 Doris Grumbach, Fifty Days of Solitude