I love looking at things that confuse me and having to work to find the sense or to come to the conclusion that there is no sense to be found.

I am fascinated too by reflections in glass and the virtual impossibility of reconciling in a rational way what is seen through the glass and what is behind the viewer-what is reflected when you look and how the secondary substance becomes part of the first. There is no sense to this. It places the viewer in an impossible position and disorients, like you’ve suddenly sprouted a second pair of eyes in the back of the head. What you get when you study a reflection is a static image-that which is through or behind the glass-and the world to your back that is reflected in the glass-people passing by, traffic, leaves shivering in the wind, sometimes people stopping beside you in an attempt to figure out what you are looking at and unwittingly becoming part of the tableau. The motion behind you is magically entwined in the vision before you and the evolving plot is likely much better than anything you’ll find on television.

The French philosopher and semiologist Roland Barthes suggested two fundamental elements to the way we look at things, which he called studium and punctum. Studium is the intrigue in something you see, that which appeals to you and which bids you look carefully, which compels you to study the motif. Punctum is a lot less comfortable. It is that part of the vision that strikes out at you, with a sense of shock, or fear, or anger, or just surprise-it is that part of an image to which you react viscerally and that makes you uncomfortable.

Reflections exemplify those concepts. What you look at is studium; the intrusive part behind you is punctum. A reconciliation of the two is a place you’re likely never going to get to, although watching it all happen and grasping at the possibility of meaning even as multiple possible meanings present themselves never endingly is a rather fascinating way to spend a few minutes.

* * *

I imagine him at court in a post-medieval country in Europe, a young boy immaculately dressed in sparkling blue, playing the flute. I can hear his music, the sounds he conjures from his simple instrument. He can bring affairs of state to a momentary standstill through the enchantment of the music he makes. He draws glances to himself and makes cynical men pause and smile. A more total sorcerer there never was, nor one who looked less like one. He stands beside two young girls, one younger or at least smaller than the other. The taller girl either ignores the boy or stares off into the distance, perhaps carried by the music or perhaps by some reverie that has nothing to do with it. The smaller one gazes right at him with the hint of a smile and an expression that might be the birth moment of love. In the background, totally incongruously, there are symptoms of a modern city. A car is going by, and bits and pieces of trees can be seen.

It isn’t real, this thing. It’s a display in a store window, albeit a pretty imaginative one, with a streetscape reflected in the glass. Studium and punctum. An image that captivated me for most of this past summer.

* * *

I love that this is all nonsense and I cherish the impossibility of agreeing on a meaning. I love that you can stand beside me looking at the same window and conjure up from where you exist a narrative totally different from mine, that you can spin a second story that exists in a world I did not even see. The stories and their meanings are marvellous and the more there are, the richer we become. They are what they are and we are where we are, two perceptions of a common thing that might be eons apart, yet sprung from the same experience. That we read the image differently is good fun, a reason to smile, and a way to add to each other’s experience. That we stand together in a common place, even if we reach separate destinations, that is everything.

Sorcerer in Blue

The more stories there are, the richer we become. Photo: Vianney Carriere

Putting words into the mouth of someone else, let alone the resident CEO is a task that a communications underling approaches with some trepidation and not a small measure of due consideration. So it was that when I recently crafted a statement on behalf of the Primate to mark the death of Yasser Arafat, the words, though brief to the point of terseness, were not without consideration. But the statement did not matter. I wrote a headline on it that said “Primate expresses condolences on the death of …”

With more than three decades of this type of thing under my belt, I should have known better, should have known that so many people never read beyond the headline or that even when they do the words in bold type at the top have colored their reception of the message; I should have known that there would be some who would take the word “condolences” as meaning that the Primate was saying Yasser Arafat had been a splendid fellow, which is exactly what he had told me not to say. I should have known that the subtle distinction between a pastoral expression of sadness directed to the Palestinian people would be read by some as a statement to the effect that … well, that Yasser Arafat had been a splendid chap.

I got emails. Now Peter Blachford, the new treasurer of General Synod and a man who thinks about these things, has said that the social importance of and major difficulty with email is that it has created the expectation of an instantaneous response. An email is something that zips through the ether and I imagine there is a substantial number of people who, having hit “send” remain seated at their computer awaiting a fresh message. The ability to meet the expectation of instantaneous response, sadly, is something that diminishes in direct proportion to the number of emails received. This means that email is not necessarily a very friendly medium. I get a lot of emails, not all of which, sadly, get answered. There is, for one thing, the sheer volume of them, but there is also an attitude in me when I read bluntly critical messages, that there is no point to a reply – that my critic's mind is firmly made up and all conversation is futile. This is almost always a mistake. I know this because now and again, especially when there is a flurry of negative comment over something, I focus on a single writer and attempt to get his or her attention. I attempt to communicate … just to see if we can sort things out and get beyond the innuendo of the initial communication.

On the Friday after the death of Arafat, I got an email, addressed to “Sir:” and that tore a strip off me and my headline. I answered. My response, likewise was to “Sir:” and I firmly expected that to be the end of that. It wasn't. Over the following three days, there was an exchange that got more and more civil and that eventually mellowed, like a sweet marinade, both my critic and me. On Monday morning, the farewell-this-is-now-enough email I got was addressed to “Dear Sam…”

This, then, is about communicating and the opportunities that it provides.

It's not the first time that something like this happens. Some of my closest friendships by correspondence have been created from vitriol that dissipated and dissipated and metamorphosed through an exchange of sentiments that convinced both me and the person writing that neither of us were ogres or insensitive to logic and the breadth of vision that exists among human beings.

Andrew Hutchison, the new Primate, has said a lot about this kind of thing and the way he puts it is to underscore the vital importance of drawing people into the conversation. People who feel alienated, he has said, usually do so because decisions are made that affect them and on which they are not consulted. Andrew's primacy is less than a year old and already, this vision he has of Anglicans actually in communication with each other – speaking and listening to each other everywhere in the church – is emerging as a hallmark of his young primacy.

Where we let things fall silent too quickly, we are forever after denied the knowledge of what might have been. We are denied the wisdom that might have flowed from that knowledge and we are denied the experiences and the richness of another. We are denied the opportunity to listen and learn.

Riding to work on the subway early one morning recently, I watched a woman sleeping across the aisle from me. A lot of people sleep on the subway. The train lurched to a stop and the woman emitted a snoreful snort, and she looked up and our eyes met and she smiled briefly as though she's been caught in the act of something, and then she left the train, gone. I wonder who she was…what she is like … what, if anything, we have in common. … I wonder what she had to say about things.

When I was a university student, much younger in years and outlook, poetry used to pour out of me like water from a leaky faucet and although most of these things are mercifully lost or forgotten, a few lines have stayed with me across the decades. When I was much younger in years and in romanticism, I wrote:

I wonder how we can know
That any of the people
Who brush by us in this city
Were not meant to become part of us
forever. …

Take Snapper, for instance, a journalist and a magnificent editor I knew in my younger years. I have thought about Snapper recently, since reading his obituary in a newspaper. Snapper thrived on a reputation firmly grounded in every nuance of his nickname. Snap he would, at each and every affront to the impeccable skills and standards he brought to big-league journalism. And he was also a master of the snap decision, a man with a unique and unfailing talent for taking a difficult problem or issue and instantly delivering a verdict that was invariably true and right.

The young people coming to the newspaper at the outset of uncertain careers would see this diminutive, wiry, grey-haired god of the newsroom with his unconquerable self-confidence, match that countenance with the nickname and with the folklore that depicted him as an expert in weaponry and a masterful hunter, and instantly decide he was not a man to be trifled with. That, no doubt, is at least in part what Snapper had in mind. It took years of getting to know Snapper to learn that he was about as kind and gentle a human being as ever strode across a newsroom floor. He tolerated no fools, but then few in his generation did. He snapped like a pit-bull but I never, ever, knew him to bite.

We judge and assess people—how else?—by what they give us to work with. The people we know, work with, love or dislike, are multifaceted entities that divulge themselves to us only to the extent that they wish to. Most people, to varying degrees, have a concept of themselves which is how they wish to be appreciated. Some want to appear arrogant and self-assured, while others thrive in gentleness and forever seen in need of help. Some wish to draw people in while others, like Snapper, prefer them kept at bay. And yet, for all the time we spend with the people we work with and people we know in our social lives, we probably know them very little, unless we are privileged to see them in another context, with families and loves ones, for instance. I once saw a movie in which a character started to theorize on how another character probably behaved when he was alone with his wife. The person this character was speaking to cut him off with the very sage aphorism: “No one—No One—knows how it is between two people who are married.”

All this is by way of offering some caution. Can the movie's aphorism be taken any farther? Can anyone ever really absorb enough of the complexities of another person's character and life to offer the definitive judgment on such fundamental things as motives and purposes? Or it is all guesswork, a matter of perceptions and splendid delusions leading to conclusions that might be astute some times and horrendously off the mark other times? We try the best we can and we must, in that process, ever be aware that we read people in a language unique to our own minds and souls. We can't ever, ever get it all right. There is too much involved that must rely on our own perceptions and our own intuitions and on our own inbred fallacies. We get some stuff right and we get plenty wrong and only the very naive ever hope that one day the world will be a homogenous thing visible to everyone the way they see it.

Like colors. I read a book about colors this summer, and I was fascinated to learn that some people actually profess to hear colors. I don't. But it's amusing to think that one person's green concerto is another person's ballad or that my red rap song is your aria.

It has long been hypothesized that people perceive colors in different ways, and the idea that they have a sound too, open to our imaginations and to our hearts, adds a delightful element to the mystery of how we manage to coexist in several billion subjective worlds. People are like colors. We see them differently. We hear some and not others.

No one is ever fully right or fully wrong in the way they receive things in the world. And no one should ever be so self-assured as to easily inject right or wrong or truth or falsehood in a world with so many subjective variables. My truth is your myth. My vision is your dream.

When I was very young, I remember I had a friend older by two grades who once took pains to assure me that by the time I reached the point in school where he was—I believe Grade 10—there would be very little left that I did not know. I was skeptical then and I remain skeptical now. Snapper, a man who was probably farther along on the journey to knowledge than most, would have made short work of the boy's presumptions.

One student told that reporter, “I’ve seen people more shocked than that from someone passing out. No one was crying. Some were joking.”

In John Donne’s metrically cadenced world, when things died, they did so dramatically and in a sudden and absolute sense. The bell tolls for thee! No longer it seems. Today, when things die, they do so gradually, by degrees, necrosis in the smallest increments. It is a frightening thing when what is dying is akin to values or to sensitivity — things, after all, that make us human.

Such visceral immunization to shocking incidents as those students displayed is a phenomenon more transfixing, more chilling and more appalling than even the events that give rise to them. The moral lassitude and numbness that accepts violence and wrongs as a commonplace is in many ways one of the evils of our times. It is a sin that crosses the generations, starting with parents, once immunized to pornographic television images of napalmed bodies in Vietnam or skeletal children from Ethiopian famines. And today the children of these people kill and maim for sport in video games deemed harmless since they contain neither nudity nor graphic sex.

This lack of commitment — of what the French call engagement — in one’s surroundings amounts to a kind of death in life, a torpor of the soul. It is a decline in feeling, a decline in caring, all the more sinister for the gradual way in which it can come upon us. No bell, sadly, ever tolls sonorously to herald the demise of compassion.

One of the great dangers of life in today’s frenetically paced world is that the acceptance of huge changes that we have learned to cope with on a daily basis may also have inured us to the little things. We see avalanches and sea changes and we take them in stride, and yet we so easily miss the microcosms, life’s erosions and the difference that a grain of sand can make in the scheme of things. When shots fired in a school parking lot become less interesting than a game of chess, something has gone terribly wrong.

Recently, I engaged a close friend in a prolonged conversation via e-mail about repercussions to the residential schools crisis and in the course of that, one of the eventualities we discussed was a social climate in which the moral influence of organized religion would be diminished or perhaps hardly be evident at all. This is a prospect that makes me profoundly uncomfortable. All the more so when one is confronted by some of life’s more dismal eventualities such as when people get shot without bystanders seeming to care much about what they have witnessed. We ought to care deeply about such things and the place to learn this caring, this communion with our fellow humans, ought to be in church. Take that away, and the world is diminished.

And yet in the end, it may be useful to think now and again about a world without churches and without the reflective moral suasion that they bring to our lives, often in spite of ourselves, often without us paying any attention to them at all. The British poet Philip Larkin, very much an unchurchly person, once paused in an abandoned church and mused about what would become of such places when they “cease out of use.” He also wondered why it was that he had bothered to stop there at all. He wrote:

It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies,
And that much can never be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Indeed, we should hope that such wisdom never shall be obsolete and that there will forever be places in which to seek it – both places of the heart and physical spaces “proper to grow wise in.”