landscape with every life

what we notice, what we miss

So there’s this painting. It’s different from other paintings. Normally, when I’m overcome by a work of art, I feel water flooding into my eyes, a tightness in the throat, a confused mind attempting to understand how canvas and pigment can affect me so. But there were no butterflies here, only a smile on my face as I gazed at it and disappeared into thought.

One’s eyes fall onto the blue-green sea that fills most of the canvas, framed by icy white mountains and a white-gray sky. A few ships move through the water, and in the foreground, a ploughman, a shepherd, and an angler are focused on their labor. At the museum, the label, bafflingly, only says The Fall of Icarus. In Greek myth, Icarus was the son of the inventor Daedalus, who fell into the sea when the two attempted to escape the Labyrinth. As they attempted to fly away with wings constructed by Daedalus, Icarus failed to heed his father’s warnings not to fly too close to the sun, knowing that the heat would melt the wax holding the wings together.

But why would this painting be named after this mythological incident? I stared at the painting intently, scanning it for any clues. After a few minutes, I spotted it: the legs of a drowning man in the bottom right corner. Icarus had fallen into the water already, and the world around him continued as if he wasn’t there. In this work, Pieter Bruegel the Elder broke the mold of so many paintings and statues throughout history. For most of history, every work of art completely focused on a specific mythological or religious event with intense clarity, centering on the moment and nothing else.

But there were entire worlds just outside the frame of every painting of the Last Supper or of the Flight into Egypt. Pieter Bruegel and other members of the Northern Renaissance, like Herri met de Bles and Joachim Patinir, created all sorts of landscapes like this, zooming out to show more than just what we’re familiar with.

My mind was racing after seeing The Fall of Icarus and other paintings like it, thinking about all of the ideas and implications that can arise from such a simple shift in how a common story is depicted. One interpretation: the stories that are passed down, the things we remember from any given period of time, are just a fraction of what has happened in the world. There’s so much that is forgotten, so much that is lost, and our understanding of the past is always partial.

Another interpretation is that amazing things happen all the time without us realizing it; we’re so caught up in our own lives that we won’t notice life-changing events happening next to us. Life is complex, and it’s impossible for us to pay attention to everything that’s happening in the world, including the events that will outpace and outlive us, passed down through generations, songs, stories, paintings.

Think of how you float through the world when you’re falling in love. Everything around you seems luminescent and dripping with joy, but nothing is different to your fellow bus passengers. And in the opposite situation, when you are grieving the loss of a loved one, a shroud covers everything. Darkness overcomes whatever beauty may exist around you. The biggest moments in our lives are completely invisible to most people. We end up being indifferent to each other’s suffering and each other’s joy — not out of malice, just out of necessity. There’s too much happening at all times to pay attention to it all.

There are so few things that are truly universal, that the whole world will experience together. Most beginnings are isolated to a small few; most endings are as well. The closest we get to a universal shared experience is the changing of the years, waves across time zones of people reaching into a new year. Now, early in the year, we all revel in a similar feeling: one of both reflection and looking forward, trying to figure out what comes next based on what has come before. A painting wouldn’t be able to capture this — 8 billion people mostly acting of their own accord, only shared by a vaguely similar interiority brought upon by a changing calendar.

One of the great innovations that Bruegel brought to the art world with all of his work was showing average people as they were. Regardless of their status or lifestyle, he showed people living their everyday lives without a lens of satire or pity, elevating them towards something beautiful without any judgment. In The Fall of Icarus, the men at work are given just as much importance (or more) than the legendary son of the great inventor, even in the midst of his tragic myth.

Imagine a painting that would depict everyone like this. An enormous canvas as far as the eye can see of billions of people living life as they always do. No one life shown to be any more valuable or special than another, simply lives being lived as they are. The title could be a billion different titles — for some people, it would be the best day or worst day of their lives. It could be someone’s wedding or birthday, a funeral or just another day. When painting it or viewing it, you’d only ever be able to focus on one part at a time, but you’d know that there were billions of other moments and stories to look at.

I’d like to move through life with that sort of awareness, conscious of the vast variety of experience occurring all around me and nonjudgmental about it at the same time. It’s impossible to know what will be important to pay attention to in the long term. Some things will last and survive, and others will disappear entirely, and we barely know which are which. Nearly 500 years ago, a man created a painting of a landscape and today it makes me want to live slightly differently. And nearly 500 years ago, so much more happened that might’ve been even more important to someone. Let us be grateful for whatever we do notice and focus on, even if it disappears soon after.

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We must do what we can to push back against the genocide in Gaza and the invasion of Lebanon. Consider calling your US representatives to support de-escalation and a ceasefire, donating to Care for Gaza (grassroots organizations delivering food to Palestinians), directly to families or by buying e-SIMs to keep folks connected to their families. Lebanon is suffering too— consider donating to the Lebanese Food Bank, The Zahra Trust, or Beit El Baraka to help provide relief and resources.

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - Why Lawd? by NxWorries - I only started listening to this album a couple of weeks ago, but it might be my favorite record from 2024!

• POEM - “Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me” by Jane Hirshfield - The world asks, as it asks daily: / And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?