“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is.”

Marcel Proust,
In Search of Lost Time (La Prisonnière)

Looking into the eyes of another being, and it's looking back at you from far out, far out.

There, if you look really carefully, you see something just like you, but just packaged differently. Just for a second, you stop being the observer. You’re being observed.

And the world feels bigger, stranger, and better when eyes find each other.

We can’t help but say, “I am in here. Is anyone in there?”, like shouting in space with the hopes of finding another universe, because another pair of eyes is another universe. A whole logic of physics and light. An entirely different grammar of noticing what matters.

But for a horse, it's the wide sweep of horizon. For a frog, it’s motion above all else — stillness almost doesn’t exist.

And there are creatures who see with no eyes at all, perceiving light through their skin or sensing contrast through vibration. Taking it all in.

Worlds We Don’t Have Names For

For a chameleon, it is a split —each eye rolls on its own path, scanning in different directions. One watching for movement behind the leaf, the other tracking a fly. Two worlds working together. For a mantis shrimp, it is almost unimaginable, and unpredictable —a dozen photoreceptors to our three, seeing colors and worlds we don’t even have names for.

Boring

And for us, it’s clarity. What a boring thing to ask from our eyes. Labels. Proof. Sharp edges. We forget that mystery is also a form of perception. That blur can be beautiful and necessary for the soul. For them seeing is not a window to the world — it is the world, shaped to fit the creature's needs. They see they world how they need to see it. I think we do too; we protect ourselves from other ways of seeing and trap ourselves into our own perception, our own gaze; where it can be lonely.

The Space Between Us

The human condition demands to be seen, and looking at a creature, a human, a mantis shrimp or a whale, we can’t really tell if we are being seen. There is no one to confirm it and we are lost in translation, in this unbridgeable space between two universes. It’s huge, this gap that no science, religion or philosophy can bridge.

But still, when we look into eyes of another being, it looks back, and who knows what it's trying to tell us. Doesn’t matter. We are just two lives, two ways of seeing, held briefly against each other, eye to eye, soul to soul, universe to universe in the same moment of light.