p.148 But what is the glance? What happens in it? (What
happens to it is all too clear; it is bypassed, outright neglected in almost all of Western philosophy, which assumes
that the glance can only be concerned with trivialities... What happens in the glance is this. A glance takes
in - it takes a lot in, namely, all kinds of surface. In so doing, it takes us places, all kinds of
places. For places are what hold surfaces together in more or less coherent congeries... giving them a "layout."... a
glance takes us out of ourselves... it brings us to the world itself. The world at a glance:
the world in a glance... it is informative of the world. For it is by glancing, just glimpsing, that we learn a great
deal of what we know about the world... A glance reveals an entire situation, a whole scene of action. And
it does so with surprising comprehension and scope.
p.149-150 the power of the glance is strikingly evident...
the primary paradox of the glance: namely, the fact that something so diminutive in extent and bearing can provide
such far-reaching and subtle insight. What the glance takes in greatly exceeds its meager means, whether these means
be... spatial or temporal... It is as if the glance were a fulcrum, a point of leverage, for quite massive
being-in-the-world.
p.150 the glance... gets us to the surface of things... These surfaces... are telling: they... show themselves,
to the glance that takes them in.
p.151 Merleau-Ponty nowhere singles out just what kind of perception, what perceptual mode, is appropriate
to the experience of landscape. The answer, I would propose, is the glance.
p.151 What makes a mere glance so potent, allowing us to appreciate that its is not just another act but
something special in its own right?
p.152 1. A glance takes place in the now; it puts places and their surfaces together in the immediate present
- or better, it captures them in that present... The glance alights; it does not linger. It flickers off
the surface of what is seen. For all this, an instant suffices...
p.153 2. the taking-in has the character of the "all-at-once," ..The all-around is taken in all-at-once.
This is what glancing is all about...
p.153 So too the glance is at once now and more-than-now.
p.154 3. ...I take in a very great deal of what is there.
p.155 The missing matter is surprise. To glance is to be open to surprise.
It is to enter an Open where surprise is not only possible but highly probable. Why else would we glance unless we
were willing to be surprised? ...Were we not so willing to be surprised, we would restrict the circle of
vision to what is already fully known - or so well known as to exclude surprise. Rather than looking out,
we would look in... in glancing we move into an arena of open possibility where we must, as Heraclitus put it, "expect
the unexpected." ...By our glance we are drawn - or more exactly, we draw ourselves - into a region
where many things can happen and thus where we may be surprised: where we may well have to take in what we did not
expect to encounter... The venture, the adventure, of the glance is to go out into a domain of the
unfamiliar and unknown, whether hoped for or feared, and to witness what happens there - come what may.
To venture out in this way is to be curious as to what lies out of direct vision... the glancer
is genuinely curious as to what may be the case around her, and wants to find out even at the expense of being disappointed
or shocked by what meets the glance.
p.156 The active curiosity of glancing is expressed in the simple desire to know what is going on over
there where I am glancing... To glance into the world is to let oneself be surprised by the world.
p.156-157 According to one leading researcher, the aim of surprise, especially in its primitive
form of "startle," is "to help prepare the individual to deal effectively with [a] new or sudden event and with the
consequences of the event." Surprise is the emotional response to the discovery of the unexpected, and it
is often the result of glancing. To glance is to expose oneself to surprise, and it is to do so in the
mode of the sudden... human beings generally... prefer the continuous and predictable. But they
also know that all is not continuous and predictable. Thus they glance out around themselves in order to anticipate
and encounter the sudden before it arrives wholly unbidden and blindsiding.
The sudden always cuts into the customary, arriving seemingly from nowhere.
To meet it halfway, rather than being its mere victim, is to beat it at its own game. Thus we go out to meet the sudden
- in a glance, often defined as "a hurried quick look."
p.157 The more suddenly we glance, the more adequate we are to the world's waywardness, its quirky
happening, its effervescent eventfulness. In the face of cosmic uncertainty, we are saved by a glance. Or almost
so: for we have to do here with... the almost nothing that matters greatly in the scheme of things... it is by the
glance that what is other to/than what we expect is allowed to interrupt our self-certainty and self-presence - that
the nonpresent and the nonevident enter into us as lifelong curiosity seekers.
p.157 The glance, in sum, allows us to savor the world as a surprising affair - as something
that happens suddenly
p.159-160 The... science of the glance proceeds ... by what Kant calls distainfully herumtappen:
"random groping." The "swift oblique movement" of a mere glance glides quickly off the glabrous
[JLJ -smooth or hairless] back of the thing or topic - the Sache. It glides off precisely in order to attain
a more informative and copious insight into the Sachen selbst [the things themselves]
p.160 looking of all sorts remains one of the indispensable inroads into the surrounding
world; we cannot do without it; the only question is how we assess it and, in particular, which forms of looking we
choose to valorize.
p.161 no one, to my knowledge, has looked into the unsuspected significance of the glance.
Not surprisingly: the glance is too often taken as the epitome of the shallow in human perception, something that merely flits
over the superficies... My argument has been that precisely in such flitting, such fickle and flirtatious
glimpsing, the glance proves to be of inestimable value in coming to know the world as a full phenomenon...
our burden can become light if only we accord to the glance... a new respect and a new interest.
p.161 Just as moments and instants in their pointed and spotty ways cut up time, so glances sever
space... the glance lacerates as well as comprehends.
p.162 so the glance allows us to cut through the encrustations of space - its rigor
mortis in the sclerosis of site - in order to find a more subtle and suitable relation to our spatiality.
p.162 The direction, the intentionality, of the glance is straight into things and people and situations...
gliding across their proffered surfaces... rendering them striking to the glancer... All of a sudden the
glance occurs, an event stands out, something significant happens on a shoestring.
