I thought my vision was pretty good. Not quite 20–20, but close. Then I read Thoreau.

Yes, that Thoreau. Forget what you may have read by or about the “hermit Concord.” He is misunderstood. His experiment on Walden Pond was about seeing. All the rest — the solitude, the simplicity — were means to this end.

Reading Thoreau made me realize how little I saw. Sure, my eye captured light signals, and my mind processed them, but did I really see? I was, at best, a lazy seer. A lot of us are, which strikes me as odd, given that we live in an allegedly visual culture. The truth is: we are a visual culture the way McDonald’s is a restaurant. We consume a lot of images but savor very few.

Not Henry David Thoreau. His vision was legendary. At a glance, he could estimate the height of a tree or the weight of a calf. He’d reach into a bushel of pencils and, by sight alone, grab exactly a dozen. He had a knack for finding buried Indian arrowheads. “There is one,” he’d say, kicking it up with his foot.

Unlike his fellow Transcendentalists, Thoreau was less interested in cultivating “a faith in things unseen.” He had greater faith in things seen. He was less interested in the nature of reality than the reality of nature. Was there more to the world than meets the eye? Probably, but what does meet the eye is plenty miraculous, so let’s start there. Thoreau valued vision even more than knowledge. Knowledge is always tentative, imperfect. Today’s certainty is tomorrow’s nonsense. As he said, “Who can say what is? He can only say how he sees.”

How exactly do we see? Most of us subscribe to the photographic model of seeing. We believe our eyes capture images from the world like a camera, then relay these images to our brain. Our eyes “photograph,” say, the coffee mug in front of you.

It’s a nice model. It is also wrong. Seeing is less like photography and more like language. We don’t see the world so much as converse with it. Consider something as simple as seeing a coffee mug.We don’t see the mug in front of us. We tell ourselves it is there. The coffee mug sends electromagnetic waves, nothing more, to your eye and brain. From that raw data, we createinformation, then meaning — in this case, that the object in front of us is called a “coffee mug.”

Sometimes we create meaning too quickly. Maybe what looks like a coffee mug is something else entirely. Quick to define objects and people, we risk blinding ourselves to their uniqueness. Thoreau guarded against this tendency. “Let me not be in haste to detect the universal law,” he tells himself. “Let me see more clearly a particular instance of it.” Postpone defining what you see and you will see more.

Thoreau slowed the process to a crawl. He elongated the gap between hypothesis and conclusion, between seeing and seen. Time and again, he reminds himself to linger. “We must look for a long time before we can see,” he said.

Thoreau cultivated an “innocence of the eye.” It wasn’t an act. He never lost the child’s sense of wonder and openness to his surroundings. He couldn’t pass a berry without picking it. “He is a boy and will be an old boy,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said of his friend.

We can’t improve our vision without improving ourselves. Not only does who we are determine what we see but what we see determines who we are. As the Vedas say, ‘What you see, you become.’

We tend to put seeing and feeling in two separate categories. Not Thoreau. For him, seeing and feeling were intertwined. He couldn’t see something if he didn’t feel it. How he felt determined not only how he saw but what he saw. For him, seeing was not only emotive but also interactive. When he saw, say, a rose, he corresponded with it and, in a way, collaboratedwith it.

Seeing is deliberate. It’s always a choice, even if we don’t realize it. It’s all about the angles. No one played them better than Thoreau. Change your perspective and you change not only how you see but what you see. “From the right point of view, every storm and every drop in it is a rainbow,” he said.

Thoreau observed Walden Pond from every conceivable vantage point: from a hilltop, on its shores, a boat on its surface, and underwater. He viewed the same scene by daylight and moonlight, in winter and summer.

Thoreau rarely stared at anything directly. He looked with the side of his eye. There’s a physiological basis for this. In dim light, we can detect objects best by looking at them from the side. Strange as it may seem, we see more with a sideways glance than a straight-ahead stare.

Thoreau was determined not to get stuck in a visual rut. That’s why he was always altering his perspective. Sometimes only the slightest shift, “a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine,” reveals new worlds: a rare bird, unusually far south for the winter, perhaps, or a glint of sunlight.

At other times, he took more drastic steps. He’d bend over and peer through his legs, marveling at the inverted world. (Thoreau was big on inverting; he even flipped his name, changing it from David Henry to Henry David.) Turn the world upside down, and you see it anew.

The more familiar our surroundings the greater the need to play the angles. Anyone can be awed when first gazing at the Taj Mahal. It takes a truly creative seer to find beauty in the local 7–11.

Thoreau’s stellar vision wasn’t merely technique, a fun-pack of optical tricks. It was a function of character. He considered the perception of beauty “a moral test.” Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. It is in his heart. We can’t improve our vision without improving ourselves. Not only does who we are determine what we see but what we see determines who we are. As the Vedas say, “What you see, you become.”

For the past year, I’ve made a real effort to see with Thoreauvian eyes. To be honest, it doesn’t always work, but when it does, the payoff is enormous. A shattered smartphone screen, when viewed from the proper angle, is transformed into a work of abstract art. The pile of papers on my desk becomes my own private Everest. A seemingly insurmountable problem suddenly seems less daunting, more surmountable, when viewed from a distance — and at just the right angle.

Some of the above passages appear in my book, “The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers,” published by Avid Reader Press.