Perception is a strange thing. I had studied these photos of Ron Mueck’s sculpture of a boy for quite a while. They are obviously from 2 different exhibitions. The larger of the 2 was in a gallery with soaring dimensions. Also, the photo is taken from a height above. The figure of the boy appears to be looking down at the spectators. There is something slightly menacing about him, as if he’s contemplating standing up and then stomping on the people. Or, perhaps, he’s thinking of playing with them as if they were dolls. The sculpture seems in proportion with the space, it’s the people who seem small and insignificant.

In the second photo, the boy seems cramped. His outsized figure can barely fit in the space he’s been allotted. This time he’s looking off in the distance. He has a thousand-yard stare. The people aren’t menaced by him at all. The space is theirs and he can do nothing but crouch down in it.

Many aspects of life can be contrasted this way. A situation that seems huge in one context, can seem more in proportion (or at least manageable) in another context. Yes, it’s all in how you look at it.

I tucked in with the latest issue of the New Yorker last night. There was a review of several books about René Descartes. This started me thinking about perception and how much of our lives are just so much a conceit of our egos. How much of reality do we really see? In the end, don’t we conjure up the reality that we exist in? Think of your life story. You know, that story that you tell every new person who comes into your life. It might be tragic, it might be funny, it might be the biggest bore in the world; but it’s what you’ve carefully constructed, and refined over the years. It’s so real to you by now, that you would swear that it’s the absolute truth.

But, how can we know what is true? I look at this sculpture and I see something. You might look at it and see something entirely different. As a matter of fact, it was the HB who noticed the 1,000-yard stare, I had been focusing on the amount of space. So, I incorporated his reality, his perception, into my story about the sculpture.

We bring to every experience in life a lifetime of cultural and psychological zeitgeist that shapes, forms, and delineates what we perceive as reality. So, our ability to see reality is limited, and enhanced, by our own experiences. All we can ever know is what we perceive that we know: I am what I am and I know what I know.

So, as a practitioner of the impossible science (political ‘science’), I would say that everything is up for interpretation. There is no objective ‘camera’ in the film of our lives. We move through our landscape unable to see with anyone else’s eyes. That’s why empathy is so difficult. As for altruism, forget about it. In “Triumph of the Will,” Hitler gives a speech and he talks about the altruism of the Nazi spirit. When I saw that film for the first time, I knew that if altruism could be so distorted as to be something embraced by Hitler, then everything must be subjective. But I stray from the point.

All that we can do is take a second look and try to put what we are seeing outside our experience of it. That is possibly the hardest thing on earth.

Please give what you can to Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders).

And, of course