There should be a German compound word for the emotion you feel when you encounter a famous thing and realize you’d never actually seen it until that moment. (Ikonerwachen?)

I had seen a thousand images of the Sydney Opera House before my gaze landed on it unexpectedly as I was crossing the harbour bridge in 2010. I knew its iconic look from movies, travel websites, clipart collections, and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego — but only at that moment did I realize I’d never seen it before.

This happened again with the planet Saturn. From Mauna Kea in Hawaii, I saw the ringed planet in perfect focus through a large reflecting telescope, and it was spectacular. Voyager 1 photographs and textbook diagrams did not prepare my heart to see a real, physical object, hanging there before my eyes in empty space.

When I visited New York I had no intention of seeing the Statue of Liberty, because I understood it to be the most overexposed tourist attraction in the USA. On a dreary day in Battery Park, my heart stopped when my eyes caught her unmistakable shape way out in the water. Only at that moment did I feel her actual charisma and meaning. Finally I was experiencing the reason I had absorbed so many ideas about her in the first place.

In none of these cases did I believe the thing in question was worth seeking out, which is why those encounters were all accidental. I really thought my ideas about them were enough to “get it.” But I didn’t get it at all until I saw the originals.

This is a shame, because it’s the most notable things that attract the most preconceptions. The more unique and meaningful an object is to human beings, the more likely it is that your first, second, and hundredth encounters with it will be bloodless depictions of that object. Over your life you’ll absorb countless views of the thing – opinions, caricatures, bad art, knowing jokes – before you experience the real reason all those views exist, if you ever do.

For example, you probably can’t listen to Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik without thinking of commercials and bad comedy films using it to satirize rich households. With the best stuff, there’s always so much baggage, and the baggage arrives first.

Even when you do manage to access the original, it can be hard to disentangle it from your preconceptions. If you think classical music sounds snooty or pretentious, pay close attention to your thoughts as you listen. Images of fussy rich people don’t come from how the music sounds — they come from mental associations with other media that depict it that way. If you go to an orchestral performance, you will probably (1) not find it boring and stuffy, and (2) find yourself surrounded by middle class people wearing their second-best outfits.

It’s inevitable that the originals will get much less attention than ideas about them, but this problem is multiplying. The further we move into the information age, the more our sense of the world comes from content about notable things, and content about that content, rather than the notable things themselves. Jean Baudrillard predicted that culture would reach a point where everything is commentary about commentary and nobody even remembers what the original stuff was. (I mean, maybe he said that – I’ve never read any of his books.)

Imagine a dystopian world, conceived by Aldous Huxley, in which a citizen is not allowed to see a classic film without first completing a years-long curriculum of gushing and contrarian reviews, behind-the-scenes documentaries, exposés on its stars, homages, memes, satires, merchandise, satires of the merchandise, homages to the satires, and retrospective thinkpieces about the type of society we’d have to be to produce such a work today. Every great thing in this world is buried beneath sedimentary layers of commentary, telling what you will see and what you have seen, all from people who have never produced anything a fraction as good. 

This isn’t too far from our situation. The best and most notable stuff is usually understood backwards. First you encounter loads of commentary looking back on some universally renowned thing. Then, years later, you might get a chance to see what that thing is.

Note that the second part – seeing what’s really there – often doesn’t happen at all. I complain about news media all the time, and this is yet another reason to view it with great skepticism. The genre consists entirely of monetized depictions of things you are expected never to examine with your own senses: foreign conflicts, video clips with context added by partisan actors, bills and studies you will never read. You’re not meant to do the second part, and if you do, you will (I hope) lose all faith in the medium.

I’ll end my old man rant there. All of this is to say I strongly recommend seeking the originals. All the images and ideas that coalesce around notable things, those free-floating impressions that enter your head first, are lesser than the thing that inspired them. Anyone can make ideas and opinions; almost no one can make a cathedral, or a book that will be studied for centuries.

Go to the original. Seek out those things you’ve heard about all your life, especially if you think you know what their deal is.

When you do access an original, try to see the thing itself, as it might have looked in its time. Read the Declaration of Independence like it’s about to be angrily mailed to the king of England. Put on Revolver like it’s 1966 and the last Beatles song you remember is Ticket to Ride. Then think about that guy you know who says they’re overrated.

If you focus on the original, almost always you will find something profound, and it’s never quite what you’d guess. There’s a reason every great original has moved so many human hearts: it’s so good that pundits can’t convey its magic to you. If they could, they would have made it themselves.

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