Who Would Have Guessed?

The other day I figured out how to put quotes into my sidebar becasue I was unexpectedly touched by a quote from the book, The Planets by Dava Sobel. For you book club girls, this will actually come as no surprise to you. She is the woman who wrote Galileo's Daughter, and anyone who can weep unabashedly at the end of a biography of Galileo should have no problem being touched by a book about the planets. But for everyone else, it is, I'm sure, a little weird sounding (at best). I've changed the quote since, but I like the one I have now so much better. Perception is a funny thing. When seen in one light an event or circumstance, a color or physical characteristic can seem to be one thing. When seen in another it can seem to be something else completely.

Jeremy and I recently watched the movie Crash. If you're a heathen, like I am, and you occasionally watch rated R movies then I would strongly suggest it. One the surface the movie is about racism, but deeper down it is about people's perceptions of one another. There is one character who stands out in my mind. He's a Latino man who is a locksmith by trade. He has been hired by the LA District attorney's wife to come in and change all of the locks to her house after she was the victim of a carjacking. When she sees a Latino man, who looks like a gang member, working in her home, she insists that all of the locks be changed again--by a white person--becasue she thinks the Hispanic man will sell a set of her house keys on the street. The camera flashes on him momentarilly to show the look of disgust in his face. Later, we get to see this same man again justr as he has arrived home from work. We come to find out that he is a man with a wife and daughter, who has worked hard to get his family out of the rough neighborhood in which they were living, and into a safer one. The scene between him and his daughter is one of the most touching of the entire movie. We get to see that he has been judged wrongly, and that he is a good and tender person despite his rough exterior. Misperception played such an important part of the mistake that the woman made. She knew nothing about him and made a snap judgment based solely on how he looked.

I don't really know where I'm trying to go with this--it's just been something that has been on my mind a lot lately. Jeremy and I have discussed several times in the last few weeks how he sees things in black and white and how I see things in shades of gray. The problem with black and white vision is that you don't allow yourself to see anything from more than two angles. You don't really get a good sense of what a thing is until you add that third dimension. It is the third dimension that allows illumination and true insight.

Imagine--all that from a book about space.