By Jussara Da Silva
I’ve loved reading for as long as I can remember. Even as a child, there was something almost magical about opening a book and stepping into a way of thinking that wasn’t my own. Books have always fascinated me, not because they provide answers, but because they ask questions I didn’t know I needed to ask. They have a way of quietly rearranging the furniture in your mind. Sometimes you don’t even notice it happening until weeks later, when you catch yourself looking at something familiar and realising you no longer see it in quite the same way.
This summer, three books stayed with me more than the others: Perfume by Patrick Süskind, Ways of Seeing by John Berger, and The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. They couldn’t appear more different. One is a novel centred around scent, another is a reflection on art and visual culture, and the third explores psychology and philosophy through conversation. On paper, they don’t seem to belong together at all. Yet after finishing them, I realised they had all been circling the same question from completely different directions.
How do we learn to see the world—and ourselves?
Patrick Süskind’s Perfume is remembered for its unusual story, but what stayed with me wasn’t the plot. It was the idea that two people can exist in exactly the same world and experience entirely different realities. The protagonist notices things that everyone else overlooks. His attention transforms ordinary places into something almost unimaginable. It made me wonder how much of life passes us by simply because we have never learned to notice it. Perhaps beauty isn’t only about what exists around us. Perhaps it’s about what we have trained ourselves to see.
John Berger’s Ways of Seeing continued that thought in a completely different direction. It left me with a question I haven’t quite stopped thinking about: when I look at something beautiful, whose eyes am I looking through? We often assume our taste belongs entirely to us. But does it? Or has it been quietly shaped by advertising, culture, history, the people we admire and the images we consume every day? Perhaps becoming ourselves isn’t only about discovering who we are. Perhaps it’s also about recognising which ideas were handed to us long before we realised we were carrying them.
Then The Courage to Be Disliked introduced another question that felt equally impossible to ignore. How many decisions do we make because they genuinely reflect who we are, and how many are simply attempts to be accepted? Would we dress the same way if nobody could see us? Would we choose the same careers? Would we still define success in the same way? It’s an uncomfortable thought because it asks us to separate our own desires from the expectations we’ve quietly absorbed throughout our lives.
The more I thought about these books, the more I realised they weren’t really about perfume, art or psychology at all. They were all asking me to become more conscious of something I had always taken for granted: the way I see.
We often speak as though seeing is passive, as though we simply open our eyes and reality presents itself exactly as it is. But I don’t think that’s true. I think we spend our entire lives learning how to see. Every experience, every conversation, every film, every teacher, every magazine, every photograph and every person we admire adds another layer to the lens through which we understand the world. Long before we form opinions, we inherit ways of looking.
Perhaps that’s why two people can stand in front of the same painting and have completely different experiences. Two people can visit the same city, meet the same person or hear the same story and leave with entirely different conclusions. It isn’t because one person is right and the other is wrong. They’re simply seeing through different lenses, each shaped by thousands of moments that came before.
The more I think about it, the more I realise that attention might be one of the most powerful forces in our lives. We become remarkably good at seeing whatever we repeatedly look for. If we constantly search for flaws, we begin to believe flaws are everywhere. If we train ourselves to notice beauty, beauty begins to appear in places we once overlooked. If we spend years paying attention to elegance, craftsmanship or kindness, those things gradually become impossible to ignore.
It makes me wonder how much of the world we miss simply because nobody ever taught us to notice it.
But there is another side to that thought that feels just as important.
If attention can be trained, then so can judgement.
Every culture teaches us, often without saying it directly, what deserves admiration and what doesn’t. We learn what success is supposed to look like. We learn what beauty is supposed to look like. We learn which careers deserve respect, which homes are considered desirable, which clothes communicate status, even which dreams are considered realistic. These ideas become so familiar that they stop feeling like ideas altogether. They begin to feel like facts.
I think that’s one of the reasons it is so difficult to recognise our own influences. The most powerful influences are rarely the loudest. They don’t tell us what to believe. They simply repeat themselves until we mistake repetition for truth.
How many things do we call “our taste” that are really just familiarity?
How many ambitions belong to us because we genuinely chose them, and how many because we saw them celebrated over and over again?
How many opinions have we never questioned because they’ve always been surrounded by quiet agreement?
I don’t think these questions have simple answers, and perhaps they aren’t meant to.
Maybe the point isn’t to strip ourselves of every influence. That would be impossible. We are all shaped by the world around us, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. In many ways, that’s how culture, knowledge and creativity are passed from one generation to the next.
The important part is becoming aware.
Awareness creates choice.
The moment we realise that our perspective has been shaped, we gain the ability to ask whether it still reflects who we are.
That question feels increasingly valuable in a world where we consume hundreds, sometimes thousands, of images every day. We spend so much time curating what we wear, what we buy and what we post, yet we rarely stop to curate what we allow to shape our minds. Every book, every conversation, every piece of art and every image leaves something behind. Most of the time, those changes happen quietly. We don’t notice them because they happen gradually.
Perhaps that is why I love reading so much.
Not because books tell me what to think.
But because they remind me that there are always other ways of thinking.
They interrupt certainty.
They invite curiosity.
They make me question ideas that had become so familiar I had stopped seeing them altogether.
Looking back, I don’t think these three books shaped my summer because they gave me new answers. They shaped my summer because they gave me better questions. They reminded me to pay attention to how I see, to pay attention to what has taught me to see that way and, perhaps most importantly, to have the courage to decide whether that way of seeing still belongs to me.
I think that’s a question worth returning to long after the books have been placed back on the shelf.
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