The Spectacle of the Unseeing

Ever more gadgets, from cameras to computers, from art books to videotapes, conspire to take over our thinking, our feeling, our experiencing, our seeing. Onlookers we are, spectators … ‘Subjects’ we are, that look at ‘objects.’ Quickly we stick labels on all that is, labels that stick once and for all. By these labels we recognize everything but no longer see anything. We know the labels on the bottles, but never taste the wine. Millions of people, unseeing, joyless, bluster through life in their half-sleep, hitting, kicking and killing what they have barely perceived.

— Frederick Franck, The Zen of Seeing