Seeing.

Edward Hopper Cape Cod Morning (American 1950)

When I was a kid the scariest thing I could imagine was being the guy who set the window glass in the top floors of skyscrapers. Each time the same image materialized as my palms iced over. The pane tilts and he uses the pressure from his chest to push it into the fitting.. There is no rope to suspend him, no ledge. He's just standing there in midair, with the white sky flashing on the perimeter of a new room.

Later in life I would find the long gaze in that guy's eyes in the paintings of Edward Hopper. One in particular portrays a beautiful woman leaning against a bay window, her gaze carrying across a repeating line of trees. They share this incidental blindness, one that captures nothing of the moment, the immediate, but has no trouble taking in the heartbreak of what lies beyond it. Like they share a curse; they cannot be surprised.