Consider the flea
“And now let us welcome the New Year
Full of things that have never been.” -Rainer Maria Rilke
Desperate for sleep after many false starts (“The plane is in the air! It’ll be here soon so we can bundle you up in tiny seats and get you right home—just sit tight! Aww…it was diverted again so we’re bringing in a plane from Azerbaijan and a crew from Cape Verde—stay in the gate area because I’m sure they’ll be here soon”), I bought a book and headed to the Marriott sitting on the runway, a veritable landing strip of a hotel.
The book? Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, Middlesex, a book that (parenthetically) I desperately wanted to have written by the time I reached page 12.
A minor official in the city of Delft, van Leeuwenhoek had no formal scientific training, but he did have a copy of Robert Hooke‘s Micrographia and a passion for all things tiny.
Using his own homemade single-lens microscope, an instrument so small it fit in the palm of his hand, van Leeuwenhoek observed everything he could imagine and collaborated with artists to produce exquisite illustrations of the marvels he saw, things that had never been seen. Although his microscopes only used a single lens, they were capable of magnifications of up to 200X while other microscopes of the time were lucky to achieve 10X magnification.
He could see more deeply, more closely, more fully. And after seeing at such depth, it was impossible to not-know of the detail, the intricacy, the complexity. He couldn’t not know once he knew; he couldn’t not see once he saw.
When observing pepper (he assumed it had microscopic spikes to produce its effect on the tongue—it doesn’t), van Leeuwenhoek made an accidental discovery: tiny organisms known today as protozoa—becoming the first person to see a living microbe. When the Royal Society was able to reproduce his experiment, van Leeuwenhoek became a celebrity, finding little animals everywhere, including "many very little living animacules, very prettily a-moving" in his own dental plaque. He had, in effect, discovered life on another planet—and that planet was “us.”
In our micro world of iPod Nanos and laptops the size of fingernails, I’m unsure if we can appreciate the magnitude (no pun intended) of van Leeuwenhoek’s work—no one had ever seen what he saw, there was no knowledge of the fine structures of life forms, no cause for this awe until then. Suddenly, different and inward worlds presented themselves, revealing an infinite regress of magnification and complexity and life within life. By measuring infinitesimal things, the whole idea of measurement changed instantly and forever.
Seeing first things, inward and infinitesimal complexity. That moment of seeing differently and deeper, without our happy preconceptions—so hard to recapture as adults, isn’t it?
When he saw a flea at such magnification, something undoable happened. The miniscule dot of a pesty bug became an undeniably intricate, complex creature with its own unique beauty—the flea was complex, not simple; it was worthy of attention, not just the absentminded swat of a hand.
How is this true of people? We see two-dimensional categories of people—groupings without definition, big swatches of folks—“Them.” What would it take to see more deeply, more closely, more fully, to move from seeing people as a “what” to seeing them as a “who,” more individualized, more beautifully complex, more—well, more human—more like us?
As my friend David watched whales in Alaska recently with his partner, Lora, they were awe-struck, speechless at the enormity of the beauty and sanctity of the creatures in front of them.
Why, David wondered afterwards to a group we were training—a group that had just experienced an exercise about really seeing the Other—why, he asked, do we reserve such awe for whales and not for other human beings?
Why don’t we look to other humans (and ourselves) with the same eyes? That man beside you on the plane? He’s miraculous—see it, acknowledge it.
Once, my husband John visited Emma’s fourth grade class to teach about seeing. He used an enlarged poster of a dollar bill and gave each student a dollar bill and piece of paper with a tiny hole in it. John pointed to places on the poster and instructed the students to find that spot on their dollar, looking only through the tiny hole in the piece of paper. The smallness of the hole focused their attention on the “hidden” objects on a dollar bill (like that tiny owl no bigger than three pinheads—can you find it?) Now that you know those things are there, he told the class, they’re there all the time.
Consider the flea.
