Voir

No one wrote on the art of looking with more constancy than John Ruskin. This anthology selects, from an immense body of work, the pages that bear on a single subject: seeing. Ruskin repeats, in a thousand forms, that most people cross the world without looking at it, and that learning to see is the work of a lifetime. The texts are given in English and in a new French translation, page against page, so one may follow the precision of the original tongue. The selection avoids the Ruskin of theory to keep the Ruskin who describes — a stone, a cloud, the way light falls on a leaf. 'The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way.' The anthology turns that sentence into a programme, and gives the reader the means to practise it.