Some of us call it chance; those less at peace with the randomness that governs the universe may call it “God.” But however we name it, there are moments in life when we feel its workings deeply and seek to make meaning out of them — that is part of our creaturely inheritance as the sensemaking species, the pattern-seeking animal. Hindsight is the enchanted loom on which we weave the pattern of our destiny, threading together fragmentary memories and chance occurrences into a thing of cohesion, from which a shape and a story emerge — a story we call fate. Suddenly, we find in our past omens of our present — synchronicities that become signposts, pointing us to where we were always meant to go.

In this haunting sense of fatedness, the determinism of science and the predestination of spirituality converge.

Because love is the supreme magnifying lens of our human experience, through it all of our hopes and fears are enlarged with life; through it the smallest coincidences swell with meaning. It is when we fall in love that we come to feel this eerie fatedness most acutely — something James Baldwin illuminated as he reckoned with love and the illusion of choice. Suddenly, every smallest serendipity is rife with assurance and every found overlap in yesterday’s shadow — the stuffed snail you both snugged as your most beloved toy eons before you knew of each other’s existence, the song you both secretly loved in high school, the shared aversion to pickled radish — a promise of blissfully joined tomorrows.

Long before she furnished the greatest definition of love in her prose, the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012) winked at its fundamental chance-nature in a playful and poignant poem about how lovers cast the spell of fatedness on each other.

Szymborska’s beloved poem, translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak — her longtime translators, whose work prompted the poet to exult in “that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes… a second original” — comes newly alive as an illustrated book by Italian graphic artist Beatrice Gasca Queirazza.

On the pages of Queirazza’s Love at First Sight (public library), the text of Szymborska’s poem unspools across a magical-realist sequence of illustrations, woven together by the floating leaf that emerges as the poem’s central symbol for the serendipities we read into love.

The strangers who populate the pages — melancholy, dreamsome people all moving through the world as if distracted by some unseen preoccupation — remind us that any two people may cross each other’s path at any given moment without knowing who they would become to one another in some future season of being, unwittingly enacting the poem’s closing verse:

Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.

Complement with Szymborska’s poem “Life While-You-Wait” and her superb Nobel Prize acceptance speech about the relationship between uncertainty and creativity, then revisit David Whyte’s poem “The Truelove” and Emily Dickinson’s poem love-poem to nature reimagined as an animated song.

“The Eye altering alters all,” William Blake wrote not long before Darwin extolled the eye as the crown jewel of evolution — an organ of “such wonderful structure” and “inimitable perfection” that it magnetizes us to the mystery of life itself. In On the Origin of Species, he began a section titled “Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication” with a love letter to the eye:

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated.

But marvelous as our own human eyes may be, they are far from the crowning curio of the animal kingdom. The honor might belong to a creature much lower on the evolutionary ladder of sentience. (“Never say higher or lower,” Darwin exhorted himself in the margins of a book. “Say more complicated.”)

The bay scallop (Argopecten irradians), older than Homo sapiens by some 200 million years, sees with 200 eyes the color of Uranus — bright blueberries bejeweling the ridges of its rippled shell, each equipped with not one but two retinae, containing threefold as many opsins — the light-sensitive proteins in photoreceptor cells, tasked with converting light into electrochemical signals — as ours.

Closeup of scallop eyes

An upper retina covers the scallop’s central field of view, allowing it to see silhouettes moving in the dark. A lower retina is tasked with the animal’s peripheral vision, helping it navigate — unlike other bivalves that live appended to the seafloor, rocks, or vegetation, scallops are fully mobile, moving by a kind of jet-propulsion, clapping their shells together with their powerful adductor muscles as they push water from one end of the shell to the other, swimming in a zig-zag motion.

But the most wondrous aspect of the scallop eye is its structure, more akin to that of a space telescope than to that of the human eye. Images are not projected through a lens that focuses light but reflected onto the retina by a tiny mosaic of mirrors in the back of each eye, tiled with millions of miniature crystals of a shape never seen elsewhere in nature: a flat square.

Guanine crystals in the scallop eye mirror

Although he lived long before powerful microscopes illuminated the wonder of the scallop eye, Darwin was awed by its uncommon beauty visible to the naked human eye — three scallop shells grace the coat of arms of the Darwin family.

Radiating from this alien marvel of nature is a shimmering reminder that there are as many ways of seeing as there are ways of being, and this dazzling difference is precisely what makes our planet a world.

Complement with the science and splendor of seashells and the evolutionary marvel of tetrachromatic vision, then revisit Georgia O’Keeffe on the art of seeing.

Attention is less a lens on the world than a mirror for the mind. “My experience is what I agree to attend to,” William James wrote in his foundational treatise on attention in the final years of the nineteenth century. In the epoch since, we have discovered just what an “intentional, unapologetic discriminator” attention is, just how much it shapes our entire experience of reality. But we are only just beginning to discover that, far from a passive observer of the outside world, our attention is an active creator of it as the brain makes constant conscious and unconscious predictions of what it expects to find when it looks, then finds just that; we are only beginning to understand how right Thoreau was when, in James’s epoch, he observed that “we hear and apprehend only what we already half know.”

That is what cognitive philosopher Andy Clark explores in The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality (public library) — an illuminating investigation of the human brain as a prediction machine that evolved to render reality as a composite of sensory input and prior expectation, replete with implications for neuroscience, psychology, medicine, mental health, neurodiversity, the relationship between the body and the self, and the way we live our lives.

René Magritte. The False Mirror. 1929. (Museum of Modern Art.)

Clark writes:

Contrary to the standard belief that our senses are a kind of passive window onto the world, what is emerging is a picture of an ever-active brain that is always striving to predict what the world might currently have to offer. Those predictions then structure and shape the whole of human experience, from the way we interpret a person’s facial expression, to our feelings of pain, to our plans for an outing to the cinema.

Nothing we do or experience — if the theory is on track — is untouched by our own expectations. Instead, there is a constant give-and-take in which what we experience reflects not just what the world is currently telling us, but what we — consciously or nonconsciously — were expecting it to be telling us. One consequence of this is that we are never simply seeing what’s “really there,” stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions.

Because these predictions are informed by our past experience, reality is not how the present self parses the world but how the Russian nesting doll of selves we carry — all the people we have ever been, with all the experiences we have ever had — constructs the world before its eyes. Our sensorium is a simulation we ourselves are constantly running. Clark traces this predictive process as it unfolds at the meeting point of stimulus and expectation:

Incoming sensory signals help correct errors in prediction, but the predictions are in the driver’s seat now. This means that what we perceive today is deeply rooted in what we experienced yesterday, and all the days before that. Every aspect of our daily experience comes to us filtered by hidden webs of prediction — the brain’s best expectations rooted in our own past histories.

[…]

When the brain strongly predicts a certain sight, a sound, or a feeling, that prediction plays a role in shaping what we seem to see, hear, or feel.

Emotion, mood, and even planning are all based in predictions too. Depression, anxiety, and fatigue all reflect alterations to the hidden predictions that shape our experience. Alter those predictions (for example, by “reframing” a situation using different words) and our experience itself alters.

Art from Thomas Wright’s An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, 1750. (Available as a print.)

At the heart of this equivalence is the recognition that changing our expectations changes our experience — not in a New Age way, but in a neurocognitive way. With an eye to the opportunity to “hack our own predictive minds,” which Bruce Lee intuited in his insistence that “you will never get any more out of life than you expect,” Clark observes:

Since experience is always shaped by our own expectations, there is an opportunity to improve our lives by altering some of those expectations, and the confidence with which they are held.

Both the nature of our expectations and the confidence with which we hold them are shaped by a constellation of biological and psychological factors, from brain structure and neurochemistry to environment and personal history. Leaning on a large body of research, Clark examines how the brain’s unconscious compulsion for informed prediction shapes everything from our most basic sensations of heat and pain to our most complex experiences of selfhood and transcendence, revealing our brains to be not passive receptors of reality but “buzzing proactive systems that constantly anticipate signals from the body and from the world.” He writes:

To perceive is to find the predictions that best fit the sensory evidence. To act is to alter the world to bring it into line with some of those predictions… It is this deep reciprocity between prediction and action that positions predictive brains as the perfect internal organs for the creation of extended minds — minds enhanced and augmented by the use of tools, technologies, and the complex social worlds in which we live and work. Extended minds are possible because predictive brains automatically seek out actions that will improve our states of information, reducing uncertainty as we approach our goals (highly predicted future states). When such actions become parts of habit systems that call upon resources that are robustly available, trusted, and fully woven into our daily ways of dealing with the world, we become creatures whose effective cognitive apparatus exceeds that of the biological brain alone.

Down the Rabbit Hole. One of Salvador Dalí’s rare illustrations for Alice in Wonderland.

Emanating from the mind’s powerful predictive faculty is the haunting inevitability of personal responsibility for shaping our own experience. Centuries after Milton admonished in Paradise Lost that “the mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” Clark writes in a sentiment of especial poignancy in the context of our present reckoning with consciousness and artificial intelligence:

Human minds are not elusive, ghostly inner things. They are seething, swirling oceans of prediction, continuously orchestrated by brain, body, and world. We should be careful what kinds of material, digital, and social worlds we build, because in building those worlds we are building our own minds too.

In the remainder of The Experience Machine, Clark goes on to explore how conscious expectations and unconscious predictions impact human experiences as varied as chronic pain and psychosis, and what we can do to hack this cognitive compulsion in order to ameliorate our suffering and magnify our vitality. Complement it with the fascinating science of the extended mind, then revisit Mary Oliver on what attention really means and Iris Murdoch on how it unmasks the universe.

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