"All that I know."
Far less than I think.
Intellect takes you to the door, but it doesn't take you into the house.
—Shams-i Tabrīzī
JANUARY 11—On a sunny Albuquerque afternoon long ago I was awarded a Ph.D. in American Studies. As my dissertation chair smiled broadly and shook my hand in congratulations, I had one startling realization, accompanied by embarrassment:
I have a Ph.D., and the only thing I know for certain is that I don’t know very much at all.
In the moment of achieving all I’d worked for over so many years—the supposed pinnacle of learning and knowledge—the magnitude of my ignorance was never more nakedly apparent to me.
How different might life be if I could keep this in mind. How less certain and more curious I might be—more openhearted and relaxed. Perhaps less afraid.
Last year, while pursuing an interest in Iranian film, I came upon an interesting paper about the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. In “Makhmalbaf’s broken mirror,” Lloyd Ridgeon, a professor of Persian history and culture at the University of Glasgow, writes of the filmmaker’s disdain for absolutes—a theme found in Sufism and among the old Persian poets, for whom Makhmalbaf has a high regard.
Ridgeon’s essay takes its title from a Rumi poem that the director is said to be fond of quoting:
Truth is a mirror that falls from the hand of God and shatters into pieces. Everyone picks up a piece and believes that [his] piece contains the whole truth, even though the truth is left sown about in each fragment.
These days I am frequently and uncomfortably confronted by the messy collision of apparently contradictory realities—“small ‘t’ truths,” I call them. Still, however much I may wish to claim it for myself, and however unsettling the paradox, there is a sense of freedom and humor—certainly discovery—in entertaining and allowing room for multiple truths.
Life, we all know, has a curious way of presenting—ad nauseam—those lessons we most need to learn. Since being given an iPhone six months ago, I’ve been taking rather a lot of photographs. It has, much to my surprise, changed the way I see. I am ever more aware of perspective. Move the camera half an inch in any direction and the entire image changes. Wait but two seconds and the light has altered.
The camera, I have learned, cannot in fact capture what I see. At best it creates a distorted record of a single moment in time: Color and light are subtly off and the photograph itself, which exists in two dimensions, cannot depict the nuance of three dimensional space. How a photographer works with those distortions defines to a great degree the art of photography.
Photography faces us with the question of perception itself and points to the distorting influence of expectation and belief. To draw an analogy from art: How we work with our own distortions has much to do with the art of living—and living with each other.
I share these thoughts now because rarely has this country been so divided and never have so many of us been so certain of what it is we think we know.
At birth each of us was bequeathed a piece of the mirror.
Alone, we cannot see the whole.