Negative spaces

Yesterday morning we were expecting a delivery and Karen was working in her office so I, being on vacation, was justifiably put in charge of receiving the package. However the delivery window is rather long, so instead of just sitting in the living room and watching Netflix, I decided to take my laptop and work there (unfortunately I can barely hear the door bell from the guest bedroom that I have repurposed as my home office). When I came back to my office in the afternoon,  I was surprised by how neatly the place of my laptop was preserved on the desk: there were papers left and right, power plug, headphones, USB connections, external monitor, all perfectly distributed around the rectangular area where my laptop had been.

In art and design this concept is know as "negative space" and is very well demonstrated in the optical illusion of the vase and the two faces: depending on how you look at the image the background (the surroundings of the vase) can become the main figure (the two faces), hence the term negative space.

Photo: Robert A. Kaufman

But this concept is not only used in visual art: I remember from one of the Sherlock Holmes's short stories that I read in my childhood how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle makes an excellent example in "The Adventure of Silver Blaze", where, as he points out, the absence of evidence (the fact that nobody heard anything) becomes evidence of absence (if the dog did not bark, the intruder must have been known to him). Since then, a similar pattern has been widely used in many investigation novels and series where, in a house robbery, the things that were not taken away are as revealing as the things that were stolen.

A similar but contrasting artifice was presented by Edgar Allan Poe some fifty years earlier in "The Purloined Letter" where, rather than keeping the aforementioned letter in a strong box, D- chose to hide in plain sight among other similar pieces of paper. The general assumption that valuable objects are safely locked away effectively protected the visible pieces of paper from even being considered relevant.

This brings me back to an observation that I have already discussed here: that we are so used to the people, things and situations around us that we do not see them anymore, only to be rediscovered the moment they are gone. Looking ahead is fine, but doing so too intently will lead us to miss the people who are walking beside us and the landscapes that frame our way. So next time you have a chance, please take a moment to look to the side and make appreciation of those things, because you never know how ephemeral they are. Have a nice weekend.