Three Worlds

Long ago, while decorating my dorm room in college, I came under the influence of M.C. Escher's drawing "Three Worlds." The famous picture depicts the three 'worlds' you see while looking at a fish in a pond in the late fall. There's the underwater world of the fish, the surface world of the leaves floating atop the water, and the outer world of the barren trees reflected on the smooth surface of water.

I loved the picture because it reminded me of one of my earliest childhood memories, a place where my grandmother used to take me to watch the fish. There was a terraced garden behind the old Andrews Mansion in New Bethlehem, Clarion County. By the 1970s, the grounds of the estate were more than the family could maintain, so they loaned the back garden to the borough to use as a park. It was one of those formal, decorative lawns with symmetrical shrubbery and stone walkways running at geometric angles. Kind of like a mini-Versailles, but without the bizarre statuary. (Back in the golden age of small town aristocracy, good Presbyterians like the Andrews had reservations about "graven images.") There was a pergola, though we didn't know that word back then; to us, it was just a "summer house." Best of all, there was a little rectangular pond with lily pads and huge goldfish.

The three worlds you see in Escher's picture are the ones you'll find in every situation if you look closely enough. There's the inner world, the underwater world, where you are the lone fish. Others can see some of your world, but they can never really share that inner world with you; it's yours alone. There's the surface world of the floating leaves. This is where most of us are content to skate around for our allotted 75 or 85 years of life. Then, there's the outer world reflected on the surface, which is unattainble to the fish, but which looms like a constant presence. This "outer world" is whatever "reality" we perceive from the limited vantage point of our little ponds: the way we think people are reacting to us, the way we think the universe works, whatever we believe to be true, based on the evidence we observe. The problem with this 'world' is that our perspective of the larger world is always skewed by the water that we live in.

And the real problem with this photo, taken in the wild country of the Tionesta Natural Area, is that it represents only Two Worlds. The surface world of the floating leaves is gone; the leaves have sunk into the interior world, leaving the surface smooth as a window. I like it. I think that's why I go to the woods anyway, so that the surface world can be stripped away.