Wednesday, March 26, 2008

We don't see with our eyes

We've just returned from the previously mentioned trip to Italy a little worse for the wear, being both jetlagged and suffering some upper respiratory thing. This has left me feeling too tired to do any housework, so I've been pondering things I learned on the trip- one of which has to do with human nature in general.

I normally wear a necklace- just a thin black cord with two small pendants, both one inch in diameter. One is a gold UUA symbol, and the other, which usually overlays the chalice, is a silver star. A curious thing is that while I was in Italy, a round dozen noted the star. A couple asked if I was Israeli... one older man at the laundromat spoke of his childhood in Beirut... a Murano glass dealer displayed a beautiful handblown menorah.

Why did I call these encounters curious? Because the pendant is not a Star of David, it is a pentacle. Outside of England, Paganism is virtually unknown in Europe, so when they saw a star, their minds saw the Star of David, not the five-pointed star their eyes were seeing. I didn't bother to correct them- there was too much language barrier to fully explain, and they were being so nice it would have been churlish to try... but it did teach me something.

CC, when you become a lawyer, you might want to remember this lesson about eyewitnesses.

1 comment:

Robin Edgar said...

Eyewitnesses don`t hear with their ears either. . . I look forward to showing a judge how Rev. Diane Rollert neither saw with her eyes nor heard with her ears some of what she has claimed to have seen and heard in her sworn testimony against me. I might add that I will be clearly demonstrating how rev. Diane Rollert made several demonstrably false statements in her sworn testimony against me some of which are quite readily interpreted, if not best interpreted, as being less than honest if not outright lies. . .