Nuance
Item No. 9
“To want to look at nuance is to want to notice that an exceptional range of almost everything exists.”Nuance: “a subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound.” Nuance presents as an aesthetic of ultra-fine distinction. It exists in the beauty of an intricate or elegant shade of something.
We see it in the variety of languages spoken around us (there are many ways to say something.) We notice it when an object blocks the sun and we see the innuendo of shadow. It is in the complexity of possibilities that exist in meaning when we’re listening to what someone has to say and in the curvature of each letter when a person signs their name.
It is not only in how each person signs their name uniquely; it is in how each personality shows up in a room.
There are upwards of 8 billion people on earth, and though categorizing personality types is tempting, we know intuitively that each individual person is unique unto themselves.
There are no two people who are exactly the same.
Nuance is also visible in the spectrum of color we see in the sky every day (or every hour). Beyond the yellows, pinks and oranges of the sunset, or sunrise, consider how even the tints in the blue or grey of a sky vary as light scatters and time shifts.
“The artist will go where you also want to look,” Boris Mikhailov, an artist, said. Should an artist point you to nuance, they’d ask you to look at almost anything and to notice that an exceptional range of almost everything exists.
We list nuance in this season’s catalog as it is increasingly easy to think in categories. To lump ourselves (or others) together. To land in echo chambers, where we think we are like everyone else around us and that there are no alternative ideas. We call the sky ‘just blue.’
This is where nuance dies.
It is easy to classify things. It is perhaps simpler to see each other as we might show up in broad-scale descriptors of us, brand personas, political parties, occupations, generations, social classes, religious affiliations, countries of origin and on.
Such characterizations would have us believe we might group anything perfectly. That our lives exist in those simple buckets of us. That we’re the color of our state’s political map–even though we’re not. That we exactly represent some social construct that others might place us in. Or that others are who we think they are based on the bucket we assign them to in our minds.
It feels easy to see life as a simple series of yeses and nos. Of ones and twos. Pluses and zeros.
Either thises or thats.
To stay comfortably in our echoing chamber, even as nuance flickers out of sight.
What is the cost to us when we operate with a categorization mindset? When we eliminate nuance? (As if it has died?)
The first cost is obviously the spectrum of the middle. That’s what nuance is all about, isn’t it?
The gray-scale shadows of the in-between. It’s neither one end nor the other.
Remember, it isn’t a plus or a zero. This or that.
It might seem easier to operate without it, even though we sort of intuitively know that no one of us fits perfectly into any category or belief or descriptor set. We know by now that the world is complex and meaning difficult to discern without care and investigation and that the ultra-fine details of thorough conversations with each other bring nuance to life.
So a cost is the meaning that exists when we read between the lines.
Essay answers are required, mostly, on many things in our lives.
A multiple choice world leaves us missing out on the fine-distinctions of life.
That world is bleaker when nuance dies.
Is a bleak world less beautiful?
The architect Rafael Moneo hints at an appreciation of nuance when he says he thinks about the unique shapes around him. “Why this shape?” He said. “Why this form? Why does the built world have the shape it has? What is behind the person who created that shape?” The building, he said, represents the architect’s personality. A building represents the nuance of the person who created it. “Why this shape? Why this form? Why this pattern? Why?”
“Look there to find nuance. Look there to find beauty,” he says.
(See also: Nuance).
Other specifications:
To reclaim it? Pause to consider what you appreciate most about a friend, a child, a parent, a colleague...chances are there is a hint right there in front of you about the nuance they bring to (y(our)) life.
Or, look up at the sky and note how the color changes.