Something Thoughful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.      

ON BEING HARRASED BY MAURICE SHADBOLT

            Whenever I am sitting in my living room and I look through the window towards down the street, I find myself being harassed by Maurice Shadbolt.   There he is with his thick spectacles, his moustache and his nose – at least that is the way I have seen him in  photographs. I have no particular interest in the late novelist Maurice Shadbolt, but his presence can be unnerving. The fact is, of course, that I am not seeing a man at all. I am looking at a tree down the road and I can see boughs and large twigs crossing one another and making what seems to be the face of a man – a particular man.

            Making faces out of things that are not faces is a very old phenomenon, probably going back to primeval times. Imagine our distant forebears making their way through a dense forest when they see a giant looking down at them. It takes them some time to realise that they are really looking at a tree – and the odds are they would then make the tree into some sort of god. After all, when the wind blows, the tree moves and its arms display their psithurism with all their hushing. Isn’t it talking?

We shouldn’t ridicule these ancient beliefs. Only a few generations past, it was common for people to amuse themselves by looking at “pictures in the fire”. As they gathered near the fire, the coal would burn, the smoke would rise, and images – including faces – would appear. Of course they were merely playing a game, but it did show how our vision could deceive us.

Then there is the matter of distance that deceives us. In the early 20^th century, there were still people who believed that there were canals on the planet Mars. Such ideas have long since been debunked, partly because better telescopes now exist and the planet has been scanned at close quarters.  Even so, we earthlings can often have wrong perspectives when we look at something in the distance. Well do I remember walking the length of a long shore, and seeing a large tent in the distance… and when I got there, it turned out to be a large rock.

So… I do not take the image of Maurice Shadbolt too seriously… though I do wish he would go away.