It is remarkable to me, based on the sample of humans that I’ve had in writing classes, both “kids” and adults, how many people 1) express great concern about climate change and its effects on the planet,  2) are completely uninterested in other humans’ visions of what the planet they want to save looks, feels and sounds like, and 3) are even less interested in writing or just noticing what it looks like to them.

Fascinatingly, one student told me that he didn’t like to describe what people look like because he thought it was like staring at someone which was rude.  Another remarked in a similar spirit that in describing people you have to assign value to their appearance in terms of conventional beauty standards

The first concern, about rudeness, makes more sense to me.  But it confuses social looking with artistic looking.  Artistic looking is about care and respect.  It is like saying: I see this human in my mind’s eye and this particular human is worth the most precise attention I can give them. Because they won’t be here forever and they are as amazing as any animal you might see in a documentary devoted to the heart-breaking beauty of endangered animals.

I am thinking of something I saw on the subway in the early 80s, maybe 1982.  I was sitting at the end of the last car on an express train and saw three or four African-American boys (in my memory they were 11-13 years old, maybe younger), grouped around the back window, staring out of it with pure absorption.  Curious, I stood to look over their shoulders and saw what they were so raptly taking in: the piercing combination of speed and density as the train gathered momentum and  hammered through the massive  concrete and metal tunnels, our view herking and jerking with the cars, snatching bits of burning light in metal casement, underground signage, the track flashing and going dark as we clangored through stations, past dozens of waiting humans, personalities firing off  bodily messages that our eyes saw before our minds could read them.  It was beautiful and the boys were radiant with it, this wordless amazement of things.

It makes me sad to think that those same boys, if they existed today, wouldn’t be looking out the subway window because they would be staring at a phone. But even so, they would still have that ability to see in them, waiting to come alive.