"I am intrigued by late Wittgenstein, by what he wrote about reading a face," a philosopher friend told me as we sat on a bench on Cambridge Street, watching trucks passing by, and munching on sandwiches called "Dutch Rules", celebrative of this morning's soccer match.
I am bound to wrongly paraphrase any philosopher, but I will try anyway, as I like this little example so much. So let's say if two people are watching the face of a third person, and one of them recognizes sadness in that face, while the other doesn't. The one who recognizes would have a hard time conveying to the other person why he perceives the face to be sad. He can, of course, describe the shapes of the downcast eyes, the lines around the lips, the hardened cheek, the hollow expression, ... but he can never really prove that these are indeed indications of sadness. One either sees it or not: such knowledge has an incommunicable vagueness about it: it is direct, visceral, revelatory, nuanced, and private.
And this vagueness--how fitting it is to the title of this blog (sombras de los ojos)--is what we experience when we read literature, watch films, experience heart-breaks, and live our daily lives. We experience that motion inside of us, that motion we call emotion. And would I be forgiven, if I take an impulsive leap of word-play, to imagine "emotion" as an "electron in motion", whose delicate trajectory cannot be pinned down by any measurement, and whose instability provides us with a quantum experience in our bodies?
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