When you take a picture with your camera, you are collecting light from the world onto a thin sheet where it is recorded. Now, the trouble with the world is that the stuff in it is sending out light in a trillion different directions at once. This makes it tricky for taking pictures. You can’t just hold up a piece of photographic paper in front of your favorite cat and expect the image of the cat to be transferred to the paper. No, the paper would be instantly bombarded with so much light from so many directions it would shortly become saturated and useless. Instead, you have to figure out a way to put a filter between the paper and the world, a way of saying “Mr. Photon, are you coming from my kitty? Okay, you’re in. The rest of you rabble, out.”

Well, there’s an easy enough way to do that: set up a barrier, poke a hole in it, and just let a little light through the hole. Sure, the hole might get pretty fancy (we call the fancy holes lenses), but the basic idea is the same.

Now, every picture you take, every picture in your life, is taken through a hole. Even those pictures you take with your eyeballs. The hole is called an aperture, and the quality of your picture is directly related to the aperture it came through. A small hole takes a really great, focused picture: the light on the other side of the hole can only go through in about one direction, so it only lands in about one place on the other side. A bigger hole starts getting blurry: the light is coming through in more than one direction, and landing in more than one place. Overlap! Fuzziness! Disaster! So when it comes to apertures, smaller is sharper. But it can’t be infinitely small, or light couldn’t get through it at all.

This leads us to the following Unavoidable Fact of Life: you cannot take a perfectly focused picture. Period. Can’t be done. To take a picture requires an aperture over which you observe. Any details smaller than your aperture get blurred together.

Here’s the thing: Although I couldn’t prove it, I suspect this is true about a great deal more than photographs. Every morning, I wake up and read the news from half a dozen papers around the world. I find editorials that strike me as piercing and true. (Or as bone-headed and annoying, but let’s just pretend they’re all piercing and true.) Back when I was a student, I would then catch a bus to school, a place where a congregation of great minds is day by day recording the story of our world in a way that filters out the great deluge of information, leaving diluted kernels of observation behind. The whole human race is, to varying degrees, spending its existence processing the incoming signals in such a way as to make them sharp, focused, and understandable. Whether this is a scientist, an artist, a grocer, a terrorist, or a first grader, the basic principle is at work. Of course we, as lenses, are not passive, and I sure wouldn’t claim that we all get the same picture when we’re pointed at the same stuff. But somehow we collect and focus the information of our senses into pictures of what is out there beyond us. The sharpest minds are like the finest lenses, focusing a great deal of divergent light into a brilliant point of understanding. But we are so small, even the biggest of us. The information of the world is like a hundred thousand suns, and we’re like a rain drop on an evergreen needle: able to focus light, but imperfectly, finitely, and shifting with time. We twinkle in the sun for a while before dropping down to soak into the ground.

I don’t find this unpleasant, necessarily, but it is a bit daunting. One would like to think that if we work really hard, if we educate ourselves very well, and if we combine the talents of many sharp individuals, the many untame signals we receive from the world might eventually be focused enough to get a handle on what we’re dealing with, as a community. Not that we’d figure everything out, exactly, but that, for example, the ways that we humans work might finally be a little bit more understandable. That we’d learn from our mistakes. That somehow our knowledge would guide us along towards those things we would like to achieve. Peace, say. Just to pick an idea at random.

And maybe with all the insight in the world we still could not avoid our own nature. (I rather think we’re probably stuck with ourselves, smart or dumb, insightful or not—which will either be the root of our own demise or the source of our persistent and gritty (if not overly pretty) survival.) But it sure seems like that act of processing the world is our best shot at even some modest transcendence of our destructive, unhelpful sides. And wow, I wish I could expect that we could get there, with enough work. But maybe we can’t. Maybe our lenses don’t come in that size. We can do really well when we consider relatively small parts of the world. But as our population and our problems grow bigger and bigger, our ability to keep them in sharp focus may just not exist.

When light is focused on a plane, the region where the rays mix together and blur goes by a name. It is called the “Circle of Confusion”. These days, when I read the paper or listen to the radio and take notice as other people work to bring the world into focus, I feel certain I’m stuck right smack dab in a big blurry Circle of Confusion. Along with everyone else. And I hope that somehow in this big human Circle of Confusion, even without our understanding how, we can keep each other company. Because what else can we do?