Faldoni, parts 2676 - 2679

 2676. Pardon me for almost completely forgetting Faldoni. We left him pointing at the mistake in the master's painting, the mistake having to do with a mix up of the clothing of some characters in the master’s large figurative painting. I am sure you remember.

 2677. Isn’t it interesting how a casual comment made in passing, if it calls attention to some obvious circumstance nobody has noticed, is capable of altering a persons status among his contemporaries, but only if the observation is unique, and not some interesting observation someone has overheard  and tries to retail as their own. Faldoni’s observation fell into this category simply because it was made on the spot, so to speak. 

 2678. It was an observation that could never have existed in anyone else’s mind at any time, if belonged exclusively to Faldoni. It was just a few words made in passing, but it transformed his relationship to that community. In grudging acceptance of Faldoni’s new status, he was given serious painting chores to do on a large painting that was just beginning.

2679. His new job was going to be another repetitive, time consuming and boring job nobody else wanted to do. He had to paint all of the geometric border decorations that run around the edges of the paintings being done in the church. This job, hardly any different from grinding pigments, or mixing up the mortar, was avoided by everyone else but Faldoni considered it a great honor.

 

Faldoni, parts 2672 - 2675

 2672. In the end one may suspect that this salesman never really cared about that cat. Also, one might suspect that even when he was watching the Chinese miners brought to safety out of his hotel, shivering and wrapped in blankets, deep down he didn’t care about them either.

 2673. The only thing that mattered to the salesman was not the tragedy or misfortune that some people or some cats were suffering or might possibly suffer. What mattered to him was the distance from his person where the said suffering was going to take place. If the suffering was going to occur in his elevator, or on his street, even if it was only his street for that one evening, then, in that circumstance, his organ of empathy might be aroused to the highest degree of which it was capable.

 2674. But inch by inch, and foot by foot, the farther the suffering that was happening in the world was from his person the less he was able to think about it, let alone feel anything about it.

2675. In the end our salesman, who does not actually exist, but is just an imaginary extension of anybody, cares only about himself and nobody else. Apparently that is how it is supposed to be arranged, since all of our faculties were designed with only our own preservation in mind.

Faldoni, parts 2668 - 2671

 2668. The difference between the size of the cat and the relative size of the miners is simply a matter of the optics of perception, and as such it is really unfair to find fault with the misguided thoughts and feelings of the salesman. As someone once said, "If one lived on the moon you might watch an entire continent dissolve and disappear under the waves of the ocean and probably feel nothing but a little curiosity." In the end we are all like that.

 2669. So don’t think badly of the salesman because if the situation were reversed his reactions would be exactly the opposite. Imagine that he is returning to his hotel and the building is surrounded by fire trucks. A crowd has formed and he joins it. He asks a person what is going on. He hears, “The hotel is on fire and six Chinese miners are trapped inside the elevator.”

 2670. Three hours later the miners are led to safety unharmed and wrapped in blankets, a look of terror still in their eyes. As they are brought out they pass quite close to the salesman who has remained rooted to the spot the entire time. He looks one of the miners in the eye from just a few inches away. He can never get that image out of his mind and thinks of it ever after whenever he steps on an elevator.

 2671. That night a cat falls down a well in a remote Provence of China. The towns folk try to rescue it with a net and some poles. The story is on the evening news for some reason...

Faldoni, parts 2664 - 2667

 

 2664. Sitting very nonchalantly in the middle of the street is a cat who is preoccupied in cleaning his fir and the salesman scans the street up and down to see what the traffic situation is and if the cat is in any danger.

 2665. Soon a light in the distance changes from red to green and some traffic begins to bare down on the preoccupied cat, and the cat seems not to notice, because perhaps he is deaf as well as not very bright. At the exact same time that the man is standing at the window looking at the cat in the street a news item comes on the radio which is quietly playing in his room.

2666. In the news he hears that six Chinese miners are trapped at the bottom of a coal mine that is on fire in some remote Provence of China. As he listens to this news the cat is nearly struck by a car, and only manages to save himself at the last instant by a sudden burst of speed with his belly almost touching the ground. The cat escapes but he loses the tip of his tail which remains embossed in the pavement of the main street for many months.

2667. A year later the salesman is staying at the same hotel. He looks out the window into the street and immediately thinks about the cat. A year has passed and still he thinks to himself, “I’m so glad the cat made it out of the way of that car.” He has completely forgotten about the Chinese miners, that is if he ever thought about them in the first place. He knows nothing about their fate simply because they were so small and way off in the distance, and the cat was very large by comparison.

Faldoni, parts 2660 - 2663

  2660. I posed this question to myself, “At what point away from my eye will the hat band be the same size as, and line up top and bottom with the Colosseum?” To answer this question I stood up from my chair went quietly over behind the man and discovered that if I put my head just behind his, about ten inches from his shirt collar, then his hat band at that point was exactly the same height as the Colosseum.

 2661. To line up my eye perfectly with his hat band it was necessary to support myself, and as I was bending over I unconsciously put my hands onto the back of his chair, and as ill luck would have it he suddenly leaned back, trapping my hands between the chair and his back. I stood there, or rather crouched there for the longest moment, frozen in time. The waiter came and went giving me the strangest look. Finally he leaned forward releasing my fingers, and I fled.

 2662. That experience in Rome made me aware of the significance of this defect of our mechanism of perception and yet the more I thought about it the more I realized that this was a problem with serious ramifications. 

2663. Just imagine, as an example, a salesman who is staying overnight in a hotel in a small town in Nevada. It is early evening and not quite dark and the man who is bored is standing at the hotel window and looking down into the street. He is staying in one of those downtown hotels and so his view out his window is of the main street which is very quiet at this time of day.

Faldoni, parts 2656 - 2659

  2656. I still remember the day I became aware of the problem of the peculiar size things seem to be, as explained to our brain by our eyes. It was my first day in Rome and I was in a hurry to get to the Colosseum before it got dark but at the last instant, with the Colosseum in sight I decided to have a cup of coffee at an outdoor cafe.

 2657. I sat down and ordered some coffee and immediately noticed that there was a man sitting with his back to me at the next table, and just like at a movie, his hat completely blocked my view of the Colosseum. I was going to ask him to move but then I found that by moving my table a little I could see around him.

 2658. I became fascinated by this simple fact, from where I sat his hat was exactly the same size as the Colosseum. It seemed so strange to me that this little insignificant hat, perhaps only one year old was able to completely block my view of a two thousand year old building. I kept looking back and forth from the building to the hat, and then he leaned back in his chair.

2659. When he leaned back in his chair his hat became almost twice as big as the building, as a matter of fact it began to be possible to make a comparison of the Colosseum to just the hat band. Leaning back, his hat band was one-third the size of the Colosseum.

Faldoni, parts 2652 - 2655

 2652. The ears seem to also have a similar defect when you consider that distant sounds are always indistinctly heard, and close sounds are always presented to the brain as being very loud. This fault of the ears can be very extreme when we consider that a buzzing fly in one's vicinity can be perceived as extremely noisy  when compared to the roar of a thousand ton freight train which might to be a few miles distant from the listener. The train might sound no louder that a moth fluttering on the windowsill. 

 2653. So too with the eye, a grape or a walnut, which at its largest dimension might only be two inches across is capable of visually blocking out something like the grand canyon, or the Statue of Liberty, only because of the happenstance that it is directly in front of the eye and blocking our view of the distant gigantic object.

 2654. I am sure whomever it was who designed the original human eye never realized to what an extent this simple fault would lead to the most dire consequence as human beings evolved and formed societies and civilizations and the absolute necessity arose of being able to understanding that things that are far away are not only just as big, but also just as important as things which are close up.

2655. Certainly one is not ever aware of this fault of perception simply because all our lives we have had no other way of looking at things, so we are not only completely accustomed to it, but can’t imagine anything different. It takes some sort of a shock to make you realize how inadequate out visual apparatus actually is.