Decades ago, a friend told me a logic problem that had a big impact on how I see the world. Two workers emerge from the coal mines after a long day of work: One’s face is covered in soot, the other is mostly clean. The clean one wipes his face, the one covered in soot doesn’t. Why?
The answer, of course, is one of perspective. The clean miner sees his friend covered in soot, assumes he must be the same, and wipes his face – likewise, the dirty miner sees his friend and assumes he must have also come out clean. This took me a little while to puzzle out at the time, because from my omniscient perspective I can easily envision what they look like – but I have to work harder to understand what they think they look like. I have all the information, but I have to put it into a certain context before I can actually understand it.
When we learn something new, the context in which we encounter it determines how we categorize it. We determine information’s veracity and meaning based on who communicates it to us, why we believe they are doing so, and how it fits into what we already believe. This is why people from different cultural and political backgrounds often seem to have completely different understandings of the world: The same information conveyed to two different people takes on a drastically different meaning based on the existing context of their lives.
This is the basis of most surprise in art. We are presented with information, and then later on presented with new information which recontextualizes the things we’ve already learned and forces us to reevaluate them. This is what a twist or surprise ending is. This is what most jokes are. This is how characters get developed and fleshed out – and, even in less narrative forms, we achieve moments of the sublime by carefully shifting contexts. We hide details in paintings which completely change the meaning of the scene, we shift harmonic chords under the same melody to completely change its tone and impact. These shifts in meaning extend into the past and future, and when we come to understand the situation in a different way because of them we carry that understanding into interpreting both the antecedents of the situation and what will proceed from it.
But we’re all just mineworkers out here, and our understanding of the situation is necessarily limited. When our friend wipes his face, despite it being clean, what should we infer from that? Change in the world sometimes happens so slowly that only later, comparing it against the context you’ve come to understand it in, do you realize your understanding of how things work must be incomplete. Sometimes we ourselves change over time, and slip out of the hole we’ve dug for ourselves and, emerging out into the sun, must be reborn and learn everything all over again.