On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz Read Free Book Online

unhappy pig.
    I was seeing a glimmer of animism in my son, the attribution of life to the inanimate. Psychologists describe a child speaking about the “happiness” of a flower or the “pain” of a broken chair—ornoting the sadness of a single shoe on the trash pile, to say nothing of patting a standpipe gently on its head—as making animistic errors . Jean Piaget brought the concept to broader attention when he published his studies of his own children’s language. In addition to observing his children, noting their utterances, he also asked them pointed questions about their knowledge of the world and recorded their answers. One of his daughters proclaimed to him, in her early years, that “the sky’s a man who goes up in a balloon and makes the clouds and everything.” Another explained to him that “the sun goes to bed because it’s sad” and that boats pulled in from a lake at night are “asleep.” Piaget was hooked. For years, he interviewed children, younger and older, about their knowledge of the world. He found them highly animistic. The moon and the wind are plainly alive, these children claimed—because “they move”; a fire is alive “because it crackles.” A two-year-old brought a toy car to the window with him for it to “see the snow”; another claimed a car “knows” where it goes because “it feels it isn’t in the same place”; that an unraveling string turns and twists “because it wants to.”
    Piaget thought of animism as indication of the child’s cognitive immaturity and poor biological understanding. More recent research has belied this claim, showing very clearly that children can distinguish between animate and inanimate things from an early age. Indeed, Piaget himself saw some early understanding brewing: children regularly attribute vitality to the sun, for instance, because it travels through the day, but they would rarely claim that the sun could feel or be hurt by a pinprick.
    So what are children thinking about the sun, or the boats, or the shoe? In my mind, animism results from making a perfectly reasonable inference about a new, incompletely understood object: it might be or act just like the things the child knows about already. The concepts and words one has learned are stretched to see if they fit around this new thing. The newly minted language-useris playing with the applicability of new words. In some ways, quiescent boats are asleep; the trash-top shoe is forlorn- looking, if not itself feeling that way. There is a richness in the child’s analogies that we lose when we learn to be obsessed with “appropriate” word use. It is a sign of smallness of mind to think of this appreciation for the shoe’s situation or the blooming flower’s emotion as an error.
    While much is made, in scholastic circles, of how to develop a child’s moral understanding, I sense that this built-in animistic tendency gives children a sensitivity that adults cannot teach. The child might, upon collecting a flower, collect several others to keep it “company”; or she might adjust a stone’s position on a path to give it different views to gaze at; or feel obliged to put a stone back where it was found, so that it should not “suffer from having been moved.” Compassion emerges from imagining the world alive. I myself felt I was losing the sensitivity to broken chairs left out on the street that I once had. When I was a younger adult, I insisted on adopting these chairs, taking them in, mending the weave on their broken seats or the fractured leg. I’d give them a fresh paint and introduce them to the rather large population of chairs already living at my house. Soon, though I had no couch for guests to loiter on, I could host a Thanksgiving dinner for twenty on mismatched chairs. I now pass them by. Maybe my son will renew our collection.
    We were nearing our leonine home again. Following my son, our route had zigged, zagged, and doubled back, covering the same street