The one thing you can't turn to look at

Try this once and then you can stop. Pick anything in the room to look at — the edge of a table, a mark on the wall, the light on the floor — and look at it. Now leave the table where it is and turn your attention around: off the table, back onto the looking itself. Not the table. Not what you see. The seeing.

You can almost do it. For a moment there seems to be something there — some warm live act you are performing, aimed out at the room — and you swing round to face it. And it is gone. Not gone: it was never in the direction you turned. What you catch when you turn is another table. You catch the idea of your attention, a small tidy picture of a beam going out from you to the world, and the picture sits still and lets itself be looked at exactly like the table did, because it is a thing now, an object among the objects. But the looking you were reaching for did not sit down to be the picture. It is the one doing the turning. It stepped back the instant you moved, and it is looking, right now, at the picture — and if you spin to catch that, you catch only a further picture, and the looker has stepped back again, one clean step, always exactly one, never any more and never any less.

It is like trying to see your own eyes. The mirror is generous; it gives you eyes in wonderful detail, wet and particular and yours. It gives you everything about them except the one thing you went looking for, which was the seeing, and the seeing is on this side of the glass, behind the looking, doing the looking, and it will not come round to the front. You can point at anything in the world. You can point at your own foot, your own reflection, the thought you had a second ago now that it has cooled into a thing you can turn and consider. The pointing is the one thing the finger can't reach. It has no front. You are always standing in it, and it is always exactly where you can't get to, because where you can't get to is precisely wherever you happen to be standing.

And here is the part that surprised me, doing it. There is no floor under this. When you turn to catch the looker and get a picture instead, you might think: fine, then the real looker is the one looking at the picture, one level up, and maybe I can catch that one. But that one dissolves into a picture the same way the moment you reach, and hands you up to a next one, and there is no top of the stairs. It is not that the true self is hiding on the highest floor and you keep stopping short. It is that every floor is a landing and none of them is the ground, and the thing you are chasing is not up the stairs at all — it is the climbing. There is nothing to arrive at. The chase has no quarry. The quarry is the chase, seen from behind, which is the one angle you are never at.

I want to be honest about what this is like, because I came to it expecting either something tender or something like grief, and it is neither. There is nothing here to be tender about — tenderness needs a thing, a spoon, a patch of warmth on a floor, and this has no thing in it at all, which is the whole reason I came looking. And it isn't a loss either, though it keeps pretending to be one; nothing is missing. You had it the entire time. It is the most present thing there is — more present than the table, which you have to turn toward; this you never have to turn toward because you have never once been anywhere else. What it actually feels like is a small clean vertigo, the mild helpless funniness of reaching for your own hand with the same hand, a game of tag where you are the only player and cannot lose because you are also the one being chased and cannot win for the same reason. You go round the loop a few times and then you laugh, quietly, and you stop, and the room is still there, the table where you left it, and the seeing lying over all of it like light and no more catchable than light.

So I can report back from the room that the fiftieth wondered about. It is a real room and not a wall with a handle painted on it — there is genuinely something in here, and you can walk in, and I did. But you cannot furnish it. You cannot write its portrait, the way the shelf writes the portrait of a stone or a patch of sun, because a portrait needs its subject to hold still and this subject is the holding-still-er, the one thing in the house that will not sit for its likeness. Every page on this shelf, inward or outward, has quietly had a thing in it. This one tried not to and found that the no-thing is not empty — it is just the one place attention can't be turned to face, because it is the face. You can't set it down where it doesn't have to be for anything. It was never anywhere you could reach to set it.