To a bee, a flower we would call plain yellow is not plain at all. It carries markings we cannot see, ultraviolet lines converging at the center, a set of directions pointing straight to the nectar. The bee is one of the creatures in Ed Yong's An Immense World, a book about the senses other animals have and we don't. The flower had been signaling the whole time, and we are simply not built to receive it.
Yong pictures each animal inside a house, knowing the outdoors only through the windows its senses have cut. Von Uexküll, the biologist who coined the idea, called that private view its umwelt. The bee's window opens onto ultraviolet; a robin's shows it which way is north. Every creature takes the view from its own windows for the whole of what is out there. Ours feels especially complete, and that sense of completeness is the trick. We are looking through a few windows and calling it the world.
I keep coming back to the bee, because we have spent decades building machines to shrink the view on purpose.
We have never been more connected. I can follow a stranger's morning in a city I will never see. But access turned out not to be the same as exposure, and the world that reaches me has narrowed without my noticing. Everything I open has studied what I already think and offers me more of it. The feed is not curious about me. It is trying to hand me back to myself, and it gets faster at the job every year. We were promised more windows and handed a mirror instead, angled just enough to pass for one.
We were narrowing our own world for free long before anyone built a business on doing it for us. Left to our own devices, we will look out the same window for a lifetime, and the feed only made it effortless. We drift toward what agrees with us and delete what does not fit.
What troubles me more than the loneliness of it is what a narrow world does to our ability to make anything new.
Nothing new comes from staring harder out the same window, only from having looked out more than one. The bee sees a pattern that is really there and invisible to the rest of us. Someone who looks out only one window is standing in front of a flower that looks plain.
So I read on purpose into the places the feed would never send me, and I go out of my way to keep the next title unguessable from the last. Lately, in no particular order: A Thousand Brains, a neuroscientist's argument that the single mind I think I have is really thousands of models running at once; Crying in H Mart, a daughter grieving her mother in the aisles of a Korean grocery store; James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk, two young people in love while the world builds a case against one of them; The Disappearing Spoon, the buried histories folded into the periodic table; and Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, on how the internet builds a slightly wrong version of each of us and sells it back.
A narrowed mind is one thing. A whole culture of them is another. Collision is where new things come from.
So I keep cutting windows. Every book is a view onto a room I would not otherwise have entered, and it is never quite the view I walked in with. Stand at enough of them and a shape in one starts to match a shape in another, a pattern that was invisible from any single window. That is the method, if it is one, and most of what I have ever worked out arrived this way, sideways, from a direction I wasn't watching. I am not trying to see more of my own world. I am trying to stay someone the rest of it can still reach.