On Seeing and Robert Walser

Five days into the month-long process of Saint Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, Jesuit novitiates are asked to meditate on hell. The only context given is a prelude, instructing the pupil to visualize a space. “See with the sight of the imagination the length, breadth, and depth of Hell.” At midnight, the novitiate is instructed to imagine “the great fires, and the souls in the bodies of fires.” See, if you will, a picture of hell.

Ignatius’s exercise gives no specific indication as to how hell should look, what color the fire should burn, and no particular structure to help the novitiate decide whose souls he should see immolated and how visceral their immolation should appear. The exercise is a frame, and whatever picture goes inside the frame is personal. In a way, it doesn’t matter. Ignatius of Loyola wrote the meditations to will self-abnegation: the novitiate was meant to forget himself from the inside out. The real question he’s being asked is: do you see?

Because seeing, writes philosopher Alva Noë, “is more like climbing a tree, or reading a book than it is like digesting what you’ve eaten.” Seeing is enactive. You decide when to do it. Stand next to a guy on a train for twenty minutes and it’s easy not to see his pants. At a school assembly, a girl looked at her dad across the gymnasium and, seeing his head full of gray hair, she said, “but my father has brown hair.” She was pretty upset. When she thought of her dad, she saw a picture. The picture she saw didn’t show the man who stood across the room with his gray hair.

Ask any professor at the nearest German literature department for a writer who cares about the act of seeing, and chances are he or she will mention Robert Walser. Even on the front covers of Walser’s books, the Swiss-born writer (1878-1956) always seems to be looking. He’s looking at a view that’s charming, pure, beautiful, and good (adjectives he often repeats); even if under the surface he feels anxious, superfluous, and small (same thing). Characters in his work want to look. They want to see out windows, and see mountains reflected in lakes. They want to forget themselves, but never totally do so. Walser’s way of seeing is wonderful in the literal sense that he seems full of wonder at the fact that there’s a world that exists outside of himself. When Walser looks, he does see. Which makes it useful, then, to look at the same picture.

Looking at Pictures is a collection of twenty-five of Walser’s essays on art. Most of the pictures are paintings and drawings: van Gogh,...