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Ahh, the wonders of nature...

Ahh, the wonders of nature…

We, in spite of our best intentions and ideals, see the world through urban eyes. We are born into the city scape, raised on it, entertained by it, formed and indeed bred by it. Few individuals truly escape its purview. As a result, it is virtually beyond the scope of our imagination to fathom a world devoid or prior to the advanced state of urbanization that has become the norm. We read and ‘interpret’ poetry sung eight hundred or a thousand years ago from the perspective of the city without even the foggiest notion that those who wrote the words looked out upon the world with a completely different set of eyes. It comes back to a notion first broached over a hundred years ago and exclusively restricted to the realm of science: relativity.

Cultural relativity in this case.

Imagine each culture, and then each civilization–for the eyewear specific to a time evolves in time too–fashioning and fitting spectacles on every child through which they will look out upon the world. These glasses mould their experience, color every moment of their lives as they mature into adulthood. Once there few adults ever manage to truly remove their eyewear, fewer succeed in looking out on the world free from their distorting influence.

It is the human condition… or perhaps we should say the human conditioned.

Nearly, but not totally inescapable.

However, woe betide the rare few who with tireless labor and heartache do succeed in tearing the spectacles from their eye, for willingly or no they have set themselves apart.