Take, for example, a flower.

By Milo McGehee

“One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with” -Virginia Woolf from To the Lighthouse

I am driven by a deep interest in humanity’s capacity for creating meaning. There are endless ways in which individuals formulate their own distinct conceptions of reality, constructing diverse philosophies out of personal experience. In studying these varied systems, truth is revealed as being plural instead of being absolute: no singular philosophy, religion, or system of reasoning can account for the entire scope of human activity.  

Take, for example, a flower. 

Surround that flower with fifty pairs of eyes and, with each individual gaze, it becomes increasingly complex, insurmountably beautiful, in one moment a song, in another a painting: an atom radiating color and smoke, obliterated and rearranged, eruptions of memory, a shaking hand, a whisper of brilliance, fits and starts, a beam of light. 

The flower is a chorus. 

My love of literature stems from this interest in the multiplicity of truth—reading literature allows me to adopt the worlds of others, donning the philosophies of authors and their characters, stepping into minds radically different from my own. Once departed from a singular existence, my conception of reality is confronted by sprawling and poetic metaphysics completely outside of my limited understanding of being. In his expansive fourth novel Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley writes “the new way of looking is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen…each sees, professionally, a different aspect of an event, a different layer of reality. What I want is to look with all those eyes at once. With religious eyes, scientific eyes, economic eyes.” There is a shared addiction, between those of us who love literature, to gather all these eyes—every potential way of seeing—and worship their vibrancy, fall into the currents of their perceiving, moving in step with their flow. One only wants more eyes to see with so that, when a flower is suddenly caught in the amber of their vision, it blooms anew.