Michael Van Cise

Is it possible, I wonder, to study a bird so closely, to observe and catalogue its peculiarities in such minute detail, that it becomes invisible? . . . [that] we somehow lose sight of its poetry.

I read the fictional excerpt from "The American Ornithological Society" in Alan Moore's Watchmen. It reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and Gladwell's discussions of the first impressions of experts. Contrary to what Moore implies in his piece (i.e. that examining something so closely would cause you to "lose sight of the forest for the trees", Gladwell suggests that experts actually have more astute and refined "first impressions" than novices.

Ironically, one of the examples Gladwell gives is a birdwatcher who can see a bird high in the sky very far away and "know" what type of bird it is. The birdwatcher knows, not from seeing its coloring or the flap of its wings, but because of the birdwatcher's expertise, just through intuition.

Certainly, recognition and appreciation are two different things, but it seems that the sort of person who can recognize a bird on sight would also appreciate the beauty and poetry of a bird.

Moore also writes,

When I was a boy, my passion was for owls. . . . Somewhere over the years' . . . someplace along the line my passion got lost, unwittingly refined from the original gleaming ore down to a banal and lusterless filing system.

Perhaps Moore is off-base, though. Gladwell suggests that food experts have a more refined sense of taste and can tell things about food that novices cannot. For example, while a novice is fooled by the sweetness of Pepsi in the "taste test," a food expert can taste the raisin and vanilla flavors in Coke classic and can distinguish, when tasting 3 drinks, two of which are coke and one of which is pepsi (or 2 pepsi, 1 coke) which is Pepsi and which is Coke, where novices generally cannot consistently do so.

With such refined senses, could someone with such a passion ever lose interest? For someone who can truly appreciate birds, wine, soft drinks, gourmet food, etc. ever lost interest in those things?

I'm reading Alan Moore's Watchmen. In Chapter 6, we learn about Rorschach/Walter Kovacs through the eyes of a therapist, Malcolm Long. Long says,

It's as if continual contact with society's grim elements has shaped him into something grimmer, something even worse.

Moore's not-so-subtle point that spending time with criminals and focusing one's efforts and attention on the darker side of society can turn you into what you're fighting against is not novel. The work that is indelibly sketched in my mind is the movie 8MM starring Nicholas Cage. In 8MM, Cage plays a private investigator who is trying to determine if a pornographic film is truly a snuff film. Through the course of 8MM, we see in very tangible ways how Cage gets "sucked-in" to the underworld and corrupted by the people he obtains information from and the places he must go to solve this mystery. One memorable outward sign of Cage's downward drift is he picks up smoking again.

It seems this concept, that spending time with criminals will bring you down, may be related to Nightingale's "the strangest secret" that I mentioned in my post on efficiency (the notion that thinking about something will make it come true - Nightingale focuses on success, of course). I also think Gladwell's point about controlling our environment and our experiences to change our subconscious thoughts is related. If we want to be successful and happy, we should surround ourselves by successful and happy people. If we spend our time with murderers and rapists, we become like them, even if we have good intentions. Perhaps this is the lesson of both Rorschach's character in Watchmen and Gladwell's observations on thin-slicing in Blink.

Moore ends the chapter with a quote from Nietzsche,

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.