She gazes steadily over her left shoulder, as if my noticing her caused her to turn. She holds me with her eyes — the coal-black center surrounded by olive-green and on the far edge of each iris, a spur of reflected light. Consider her smooth unworried forehead, the intimation of brows, the dusk of shadow beside her nose, and the gentle curves descending from cheekbones to chin. The hint of white behind her parted lips, the lower one gleaming, moist, suggests she’s about to say something. Something disarming. Maybe intimate. And the soft line of her jaw leads to her shadowed neck and lobe, where, shimmering like a glint of distant moonlight, dangles the pearl earring for which she’s known.
I’ve admired that painting by Johannes Vermeer for some time, at first moved by the girl’s direct gaze and simple loveliness but gradually and more importantly drawn to the artist’s careful, humane attention to detail: the light from an unseen window falling across her face, spreading over the uppermost part of the blue turban concealing her hair, and casting a small curved triangle on her throat. The cool gray shadow stretching from the corner of her eye to the lobe of her ear. Beneath her left shoulder, darkness creases her tawny coat and, below the earring, the shaded collar. All this results, of course, in a striking, artful image of the girl, which transports her and us — vividly alive —across the centuries.
But too often we overlook specificity such as this in our daily lives. The clamor of synthetic busyness, interminable torrents of online information and rumor, the deceptions of AI, and social media trivialities fill our time, litter our minds, and meddle in our awareness. Too many of us accept these artificial diversions as reality, all the while discarding our own genuine thoughts and emotions and sleepwalking through this physical life, thinking it nothing more than white noise and irrelevant background.
In so doing, we risk missing the actualities that ground us and enrich our days: the orange galaxy of a cat dozing in a sunlit chair, for example, or the blue-and-black head of a green jay dangling from the base of a bird feeder. We may be oblivious to the immense tin elephant — ears spread like wings and trunk raised above the white tusks — tied down in the back of an old pickup parked on Musser Street or the thin sunlit clouds laced with an evening’s infinite shades of pink. Or the first wobbly steps of the jabbering granddaughter whose fine black hair reaches at last to her eyes. If our attention is diverted and awareness fails us or if we only look but do not see, we risk missing those moments that invest life with living and the human with humanity.
And by failing to attend, we often lose and deny others far more. When we see the self we reveal online as our actual self, we descend into a wishful fiction that hides the flaws and failures necessary for growing and maturing. When we surrender to the spineless ambiguity and hatefulness of political-ese and the barrage of corporate clamor and permit their slogans —“Have it your way,” What’s in your wallet?”, “Make America great again,” “Just do it,” etc., etc. — to determine our decisions, we submit to manipulation and willingly disregard choices that would lead us to a more fulfilling, more ethical, more moral life. When we ignore specific details and abridge the world rather than recognizing its scope and wonder or summarize people with ignorant generalizations and abstractions instead of distinguishing and, therefore, dignifying individuals, we belittle ourselves and disregard others’ humanity.
If I see myself and my past honestly, I suspect that the girl’s effect on me may also arise from a distant, more intimate source, that in her look I recognize the one I’d expected years ago. I still wonder if, before reaching the door of the Mercury idling at the curb, she’ll stop, turn, and fix me with her dark eyes, her lips parted as if deciding what to say, whether to hiss an accusation or state flatly how I had failed us, in short, to justify her abrupt leaving. But she did not turn and, being young and stubborn, I did not call to her or tell her I wanted her to stay. I only stood on that narrow sidewalk leading from the small house where we’d planned to live and raise our daughter who would be born a few months later. In the girl’s face, I see a thoughtful intention that I did not see all those years ago.
The only solace, the only way to fill the emptiness I felt then was to lose myself running for miles, to exhaust myself so I could sleep, to hold on to the particulars of each stride. The small shadows of stones on the gravel road. The way the wild oats and quack grass bent under the wind and a contrail slipped across the blue sky. A striped gopher scampering along the shoulder and disappearing into his hole. Dust rolling in a cloud behind Donneth Krinke’s pickup as he approached from the west. A jackrabbit startled into a long-eared lope across the stubble of cut alfalfa. And through the limbs of a soaring cottonwood, the crescent moon, faint in the late afternoon, shining like a pearl dangling from a smooth, untroubled branch.
