“The illusion that, if we can see something clearly, we see it as it really is, is hugely seductive. Ruskin, in Modern Painters, makes the point that clarity is bought at the price of limitation: ‘We never see anything clearly … What we call seeing a thing clearly, is only seeing enough of it to make out what it is; the point of intelligibility varying in distance for different magnitudes and kinds of things …’ He gives the example of an open book and an embroidered handkerchief on a lawn. Viewed from a distance of a quarter of a mile, they are indistinguishable; from closer, we can see which is which, but not read the book or trace the embroidery on the handkerchief; as we go nearer, we 'can now read the text and trace the embroidery, but cannot see the fibres of the paper, nor the threads of the stuff’; closer still and we can see the watermark and the threads, 'but not the hills and dales in the paper’s surface, nor the fine fibres which shoot off from every thread’; until we take a microscope to it, and so on, ad infinitum. At which point do we see it clearly? 'When, therefore, we say, we see the book clearly’, Ruskin concludes, 'we mean only that we know it is a book.’ Clarity, it seems, describes not a degree of perception, but a type of knowledge. To know something clearly is to know it partially only, and to know it, rather than to experience it, in a certain way.”
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