I hope this book will inspire every reader to stop and consider things that are...so clearly meaningless that they never seemed worth a second thought....

Grass, the night sky, a postage stamp, a crack in the sidewalk, a shoulder. Ordinary objects of everyday life.

But when we look at them--really look at them--what do we see?

In the tradition of John Berger's bestselling Ways of Seeing, James Elkins's How to Use Your Eyes invites us to look at--and maybe to see for first time--the world around us, with breathtaking results. Here are the common artifacts of life, often misunderstood and largely ignored, brought into striking focus. A butterfly's wing pattern encodes its identity. A cloudless sky yields a precise sequence of colors at sunset. A bridge reveals the relationship of a population with its landscape. With the discerning eye of a painter and the zeal of a detective, Elkins also explores complicated things like mandalas, the periodic table, or a hieroglyph,remaking the world into a treasure box of observations--eccentric, ordinary, marvelous.

How to Use Your Eyes is a thrilling read evocative of the work of Diane Ackerman and Stephen Jay Gould. It will transform your view of nature and the mind.