When a Stranger’s Vision Teaches You Your Own
There’s a photograph in our bedroom that Happy bought from a street vendor three years ago. Black and white, slightly blurred—a child’s hands reaching toward raindrops on a window. For months, it was just decoration. Then one morning, watching Arash trace patterns on our fogged balcony door, something shifted. I suddenly understood what the photographer had seen: the universal grammar of longing, the way we all reach for what separates us from the world we want to touch.
That moment of recognition felt like stumbling upon someone’s diary and discovering they’d written your dreams.
This is the strange intimacy that exists between stranger and stranger—the artist we’ll never meet and ourselves, sitting alone with their work in the middle of an ordinary day. It’s more intimate than most of our actual relationships because it bypasses the politeness, the small talk, the careful presentation of acceptable selves. Art is the artist’s naked thoughts, and when we truly see it, we’re naked too.
I remember the first time I read Borges. I was twenty-four, sitting in the university library, and his story “The Lottery in Babylon” opened something in me I didn’t know was closed. Here was someone who understood that reality itself might be arbitrary, that the patterns we think we see might be illusions we’ve agreed to share. For weeks afterward, I carried that story like a secret fever. I hadn’t just read it; I had been infected by another person’s way of seeing.
But here’s what disturbs me about these moments: they reveal how rarely we truly see anyone, including ourselves. We live so much of our lives in translation—explaining ourselves through convention, hiding our strangeness behind acceptable masks. Then we encounter a Van Gogh painting or a Ghazal by Ghalib, and suddenly we’re in the presence of someone who refused to translate, who painted or wrote exactly what they saw, even when it made no sense to anyone else.
The intimacy isn’t just that we understand them. It’s that they help us understand ourselves.
When I watch Happy arrange flowers, I sometimes think about Japanese ikebana masters from centuries ago. They probably never imagined their aesthetic philosophy would help a man in Dhaka recognize the artistry in his wife’s daily acts of transformation. Yet here I am, understanding something essential about beauty and intention because someone long dead refused to arrange flowers the way everyone else did.
This is the mystery that keeps me awake some nights: how does consciousness reach across time and space to touch consciousness? How does a painter’s struggle with light in 17th century Amsterdam speak directly to my struggle with understanding in 21st century Bangladesh? What invisible thread connects my confusion with Rilke’s confusion, my loneliness with Emily Dickinson’s solitude?
I think about the artists whose vision I’ll never understand—the ones whose inner world remains permanently foreign to me. Are they less talented, or do I simply lack the organ of perception needed to receive their transmission? Sometimes I suspect that understanding an artist’s vision says as much about our limitations as our sensibilities. We recognize only what we’re equipped to recognize.
Arash draws constantly—wild, impossible creatures that populate elaborate worlds. His drawings make perfect sense to him, but I often find myself studying them like archaeological artifacts from a civilization I can’t quite decode. Is this how future generations will look at the art that moves me so deeply? Will my grandson wonder how anyone ever found meaning in the novels that reshape my understanding of existence?
The strangest part is how this intimacy changes us. I’m not the same person who first encountered that Borges story. The photographer who captured those small hands on the window has altered how I see longing itself. We think we’re passive consumers of art, but really we’re being constantly transformed by other people’s courage to show us what they see.
Late at night, when the house is quiet and I’m reading poetry by people I’ll never meet, I sometimes feel like I’m participating in the largest conversation humanity has ever had—a conversation that spans centuries and continents, conducted in the language of shared recognition. We’re all trying to solve the same puzzle: what does it mean to be briefly conscious in a vast, indifferent universe? And occasionally, miraculously, someone’s attempt at an answer illuminates our own.
The woman who took that photograph of a child reaching toward raindrops probably never intended to change how a stranger would see his son’s gestures. She was simply documenting a moment that moved her. But now, years later, in a small apartment in Dhaka, her vision lives inside my vision. Her way of seeing has become part of how I see.
This is the true magic of art: not that it’s beautiful or meaningful, but that it proves we’re not alone in our strange ways of experiencing existence. Somewhere, someone else saw what we’ve seen, felt what we’ve felt, wondered what we’ve wondered—and they cared enough to leave evidence.
The intimacy of understanding an artist’s vision isn’t really intimacy with the artist. It’s intimacy with the part of ourselves we never knew how to articulate, suddenly finding its voice in someone else’s courage to speak.
