(Close your eyes, move round the room and notice how the faculty of touch is like a static, limited form of sight.) We never look at just one thing we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. To touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it. As a result of this act, what we see is brought within our reach - though not necessarily within arm's reach. (It can only be thought of in this way if one isolates the small part of the process which concerns the eye's retina.) We only see what we look at. Yet this seeing which comes before words, and can never be quite covered by them, is not a question of mechanically reacting to stimuli.
When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match : a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate. Nevertheless their idea of Hell owed a lot to the sight of fire consuming and the ashes remaining - as well as to their experience of the pain of burns. In the Middle Ages when men believed in the physical existence of Hell the sight of fire must have meant something different from what it means today. The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.
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