The Cerebral Snapshot

“Cerebral Snapshot” was a name I came out with on that late April night when I decided to begin blogging again. I had intended the name of my blog to be original, but apparently, there was at least one person who beat me to it, 43 years ago.

Paul Theroux wrote a charming essay entitled “The Cerebral Snapshot” in 1965.

“What I have told, may not always have been the pictorial truth – a camera may easily have seen something different. But when you see a sunset, or a giraffe, or a child eating a melting ice-cream cone there is a chemical reaction inside you. If you really stand as innocent as you can, something of the movement, entering through your eyes, gets into your body where it continues to rearrange your senses. Also – and for a writer this bit of information is priceless - a picture is worth only a thousand words or so.”

What might have appeared, to a science-trained mind, as simply a difference between the objective truth and the perception of a person was put across by him in an entirely romantic manner. I suppose that is the role of writers, to share his experience of an event in the way he perceived it and the way it affected him. A picture is a mere pictorial documentation of the (often boring) objective truth that diminishes human experience. Then again, everyone experiences a picture differently, too.