Looking through a keyhole is a myopic approach to seeing life.
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There’s something about a locked door with keyhole. The eye is mysteriously drawn to it, wondering what secrets might lie beyond. Who has not pressed an eyeball to a keyhole to see what’s on the other side?
Ah, yes, the other side. That’s always where curiosity and imagination exist. If only we could see a larger slice of it. Keyholes offer only limited voyeurism. And, to be honest, we’re all closet peeping Toms to some degree.
It’s like looking at life through a kaleidoscope of colored bits and pieces, changing shapes and patterns in ever-evolving slices and shards. Interesting, but never seeing the whole picture.
We rarely see closed-door keyholes now. Or, for that matter, peepholes in doors of cheap hotels. We have more vast ways and means and larger keyholes to see life today. We’re into dead bolts, devices to lock life out, front-door cameras and Alexa.
But before these days, we had peepholes to entice our imagination. Like, for example, the changing room at our city pool. A cinder block wall separated the genders. In those days you were either one or the other. Simple biology. No pronouns. No confusion.
Anyway, some wise guy had bored out a tiny peephole in the mortar joint with his pocketknife. As you can imagine, there was pushing and shoving and name-calling at certain times to get an eyeball to the peephole.
It was so small not even a vivid imagination could squeeze an eyeball through it. In retrospect, it was pretty much laughable, long on teenage fantasies and short on visual substance. Exaggerated bragging was all it supplied.
On most mornings I have coffee while gazing out the glass-paneled front door. It’s about the best I can do for a keyhole to the early morning outside world. Joggers, leaf blowers and streaming traffic offer up possibilities for a voyeuristic mind to conjure up hypothetical analyses and imaginary tales of the lives of those passing by.
For several years I spent time in Atlanta on business. The hotel furnished a small balcony that gave an expansive view of a parking lot and adjacent all-glass office building. It was a large keyhole through which to view people as they arrived for work, carrying briefcases, backpacks and other paraphernalia.
I would occupy myself by wondering what their commuting lives consisted of as they settled into their office cubicles. Some seemed excited to be there, others just plodded their way in. It would have been easy to waste hours to no end wondering about their lives.
Our keyholes are more expansive now—we see too much. The world, even our little world, is larger. It’s impossible to synthesize what we see, much less make sense of it all. We try to figure out where our piece of the mosaic fits in, or even if it does. ‘Too much’ is a trip to the cuckoo’s nest.
Slice up the pie of life as we might, it comes out the same—we only see in part, a tiny part at that, never the whole. Why? Because like the kaleidoscope, there’s another side to everything.
So, we spend our days streaming, searching screens, iPhones, computers, TVs, movies. We read books and newspapers, looking for a grip to grab while living inside worn-out traditions that stick to us like old cliches…a stitch in time, a penny saved, early to bed and such.
Sometimes we try to eyeball keyholes of the past for edification. Nothing there. All rusted over. As for keyholes of the future, they’re all locked up in the Providential Vault, the lock of which not even Houdini could pick.
But somehow George Orwell got an inside glance at the other side. He wrote the prophecy in his book, 1984. While his timing was a little off, the Newspeak Dictionary is on its way for publication.
***
Choose your keyholes wisely…Big Brother’s eye might be looking back at you.
Bud Hearn
April 17, 2023