In ordinary life, we don’t spend very long looking at things or at the natural world or at people, but writers do. It is what literature has in common with painting, drawing, photography. You could say, following John Berger, that civilians merely see, while artists look. In an essay on drawing, Berger writes that ‘To draw is to look, examining the structure of experiences. A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree being looked at.
