thoughts about judging

09 Aug, 2026

The first few times I meet someone, I make several categorizations. The process is intuitive—almost unconscious—but over the years, I’ve come to recognize how much I quietly note. From, the way someone carries or presents themselves to the apparent glimmer—or lack thereof—in their soul, I find that I’m constantly registering what I believe to be the essence of their being and mapping these observations onto known archetypes.

I’m not so foolish as to assume I’m never mistaken. And yet, to justify the gap, I tell myself I remain open-minded, and that an immediate first impression is both natural and efficient; surely, if I don’t hold my judgment infallible, there is no harm in immediate categorizations. If I initially take someone for a nabob or a pauper, but they are truly neither, who have I harmed? No one!

Recently, I attended an art installation with my girlfriend, a piece called clinamen. It wasn’t what I expected from art. In a depressingly industrial room sat a large wooden platform. On top of the platform, dozens of plain ceramic bowls floated in three basins of bright cerulean water. They drifted freely, now and then bumping into each other with a distinct ring.

I waited to be moved. When nothing came, I set about finding the meaning myself. I read the placard twice. I turned the word “clinamen” over in my mind for some hidden insight—gibberish. I watched the other visitors—a young woman repeatedly posing for a selfie, a family sitting together and blankly staring, a pair of confused friends talking with their hands over what the piece means. Surely, they felt nothing; I felt resentment. I studied the room, its industrial bones, the cerulean too bright to be natural, as though the significance were a thing lodged somewhere and I had only to search the right corner to pry it loose.

Nothing came. I turned away.

Some things cannot survive being looked at. Joy, as C.S. Lewis described, appears unexpectedly—but turn to seize it and it thins to nothing.¹ So too is this phenomenon present in many forms of art. While not ubiquitous, certain works will not respond to frontal questions; they yield nothing to the viewer who plants himself before them and demands to be told what they mean.² However, turn to the side, glance from your peripherals, let the romance of the world reach your cynical soul, and a canvas of unremarkable white becomes a rabbit in a snowstorm. The hare is there—mid-stride—clinging to life but fix your eyes on it and the snow closes over—there is nothing.

People are no different. Stare at someone directly, take them apart trait by trait, instance by instance, and you will always find plenty to object to. However, turn to the side, and the same person is far better than his list of failings suggests. This is the grace everyone naturally extends to themselves. We know our shortcomings better than others, but despite that, we do not tally personal failures and declare ourselves villains. And yet, I rarely extend this mercy to strangers and acquaintances; I hold them to a list of wrongs, mistaking my disappointment for discernment.

And so, I finally return to the question: “If I initially take someone for a nabob or a pauper, but they are truly neither, whom have I harmed?” Myself. This should have been the most obvious of all—that if joy and meaning recede under direct looks, a person, who contains both, will too. And yet, I have gone through the world holding everyone to an accounting I would never survive—staring so intently at every dim star that I never considered the sparkling constellation.

In that room of bowls, perhaps there was nothing to find—no hidden meaning, no answer lodged in a corner for me to pry loose. But I would never know, because I had come demanding one instead of letting the thing take me in. It is only now that I can appreciate what I might have seen, had I only turned to the side.