A passage from Ingold’s Being Alive linked into a 20-year-old chain of thought this morning.

While walking side by side, pedestrians can remain aware of and coordinate each other’s gait and pace through peripheral vision, which is especially sensitive to movement, even though they may not ‘see’ one another directly (on the role of peripheral vision in the detection of movement, see Downey 2007). In a recent study of pedestrian behaviour on the streets of the city of Aberdeen, in north-east Scotland, Lee and Ingold (2006) found that side-by-side walking was generally experienced as a particularly companionable form of activity. Even while conversing, as they often did, companions would rarely make direct eye contact, at most inclining their heads only slightly towards one another. Direct face-to-face interaction, by contrast, was considered far less sociable. Crucially, in walking together, companions share virtually the same visual field, whereas in face-to-face interaction each can see what is behind the other’s back, opening up the possibility for deceit and subterfuge. When they sit and face one another, rather than moving along together, conversers appear to be engaged in a contest in which views are batted back and forth rather than shared.

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First, Rilke. This passage has oscillated between inspiring and bothering me since a friend gave it to me typewritten on a slip of paper at a critical moment in the autumn of 1989. If he hadn’t done this, I wouldn’t be married now, and my two daughters would not exist. Though my assessment of its truth changes constantly, my assessment of its value as a meditation never changes. Here it is:

A merging of two people is an impossibility; and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.

The essential question is: “merge how?” And also: in what respects and to what degree is the other’s subjectivity an object to us?

I think the answer to these questions actually changes over times, rhythmically and cyclically, and this is what causes my opinion of the passage to oscillate.

Here is where my oscillation has brought me today: 1. To the degree a person wants to merge into one with the other without remainder, that person’s love has not transcended the drive to possess and subsume (or the passive complement, to be possessed and subsumed) and to annihilate otherness (which is to say it is mere lust). 2. And to the degree a co-subjective merging has not occurred, love is still only a possibility.  3. Further, that possibility exists only if there is both lust and resistance-to-lust powerful enough to force dialectic and consequent transcendence. If lust and resistance-to-lust is missing, and co-subjectivity has stagnated, yet the couple still wants to persist in couple-hood, what you get is a not-at-all-wonderful side-by-side arrangement: a modern marriage. It might be assigned official marriage status, but even if it is blessed by the Pope, the Dalai Lama and every other marriage-blessing authority on Earth, practically and actually, it will never be no more than civil union, or an uncivil one.

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The second passage is C. S. Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed”, a short essay I’ve attacked, refuted, ridiculed, and defeated in my own mind dozens of times, only to have it return a few months or years later, all fresh and compelling — and irritating.

I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

But this is only a very simple example of the difference between looking at and looking along. A young man meets a girl. The whole world looks different when he sees her. Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember all his life, and ten minutes casual chat with her is more precious than all the favours that all other women in the world could grant. He is, as they say, “in love”. Now comes a scientist and describes this young man’s experience from the outside. For him it is all an affair of the young man’s genes and a recognised biological stimulus. That is the difference between looking along the sexual impulse and looking at it.

One thing about this analogy has always seemed very strange to me. Lewis looks at the beam of light (or rather the reflection of dust in the beam) from the side, and he also steps into the beam and looks straight up into the source of light — but he never steps into the beam and looks along its beam toward the illuminated objects. To my perhaps too-literal eye, this seems to ignore biological design. The eye clearly is not meant to stare into the sun, but to look at what the sun illuminates.

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There’s more to seeing than looking-at and looking-along. There’s also looking-along-toward and looking-along-with. Lewis entertains only looking right into the glare face-to-face like Rilke’s infatuated gazing lovers.

It seems both Rilke and Lewis could learn something from Ingold’s strolling Scottish companions.

And even with this expansion, we are still inside the little world of optics. There’s far more to life and truth than seeing, metaphorically speaking.