Steven LaChance Blog

What do you suppose Christopher Isherwood meant when he wrote these words?

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

The beginning is easy enough to understand, and it is the part most often remembered. I am a camera. Isherwood was a writer observing the world around him, recording the people, places, conversations, and moments that passed before his eyes.

But I have always been more interested in what comes next.

“Quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

I don’t believe Isherwood was describing himself as shallow, uncaring, or disconnected from what he witnessed. He was anything but a shallow man. I think there is something much more human, and much more unsettling, contained in those words.

Consider where he was and the times through which he was living.

Isherwood was in Berlin during the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. He was watching a society change around him. Hatred was becoming increasingly acceptable. Political violence was becoming part of ordinary life. People were being singled out and dehumanized. And yet ordinary life continued alongside it.

People still went to work. They met friends. They ate dinner. They fell in love. They worried about money. They laughed. They made plans for tomorrow.

And they watched.

That is how I read Isherwood’s words. He was the camera recording what was happening, but he was also a human being caught inside the very history he was recording. He wasn’t standing safely outside the photograph. He was in it.

Perhaps “quite passive, recording, not thinking” describes something that happens to human beings when the reality surrounding them becomes too enormous or frightening to fully comprehend.

We become numb.

Not necessarily because we don’t care. Sometimes because we care and simply don’t know what to do with what we are seeing. Fear can do that. Exhaustion can do that. Powerlessness can do that. Denial can do that.

And perhaps an entire society can experience some version of it.

We have the luxury of looking backward at history and knowing what happened next. The people living through it did not. History did not arrive at their doors with a label telling them which chapter they were living through. It happened one day at a time. One change at a time. One outrage at a time.

And people adapted.

That is what makes Isherwood’s words so haunting to me.

So look at the world around you. Look through your own proverbial camera at everything you are witnessing simply by being alive at this particular moment.

What have you seen so many times that you barely notice it anymore?

What once shocked you that now feels ordinary?

What are you choosing not to think too deeply about because thinking about where it might lead is frightening, exhausting, or simply too difficult?

What are you numbing yourself to?

History does not always announce itself while it is happening.

Sometimes we simply become accustomed to the picture.