The Great Naturalist John Burroughs on the Art of Noticing and What Artists Can Learn from Naturalists

“We think we have looked at a thing sharply until we are asked for its specific features.”

“We hear and apprehend only what we already half know,” Thoreau wrote as he considered what it takes to see unblinded by preconception. “The art of seeing has to be learned,” Marguerite Duras sang a century later from the pages of her symphonic reckoning with what makes life worth living.

Partway in time between these two uncommon seers, another — the great naturalist (or “naturist,” as he described himse...