“On Seeing” – Frank González-Crussí

Hmmm… this book should not really be reviewed here but in an equivalent Popular Art setting. Having read a review in Nature I got mildly interested but my expectations of cool eye-related trivia and perhaps even the odd optical illusion in print were sorely disappointed. Instead, I found something like “the eye through the ages in poetry and paintings” mixed in with accusations of how people love to see the indecent.

Suiting the subtitle “Things seen, unseen, and obscene”, the first chapter discusses female genitals and how men have often risked death to get a glimpse, as, rather grandly, “Man senses in Woman the insatiability of the ocean, the mystery of the night, and the unfathomableness of infinity.” (And I thought they were just horny.) We then move on to other shock topics such as watching birth, death, defecation and autopsies.

I was a little irritated at the extremely formal and convoluted language González-Crussí uses, exemplified in his refusal to call his “ocular globe” a simple eyeball, and once, he actually uses the royal “we”! He also doesn’t always call a spade a spade when it comes to exposing pseudoscience of centuries past.

I did enjoy reading this book, however, for the many short stories with (sometimes unremarkable) visual references the author summarises and the occasional scientific reference. The reason for feeling uncomfortable when we catch someone staring at us, for example, might be “an atavistic remembrance of a danger sign that [...] meant that we were being watched by a predator”.
Also, it is true that a picture may be worth a thousand words but it never actually says them and we always see what we want or expect to see – it is merely “a dumb sign that an event of some sort has taken place, or that something exists – or has existed – that looks like the image captured by the camera.”