"Tiny Hands"

As mentioned before, I recently finished Lawrence Weschler's wonderful book "Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergence," in which he riffs on seemingly unlikely visual associations occurring in a myriad of contexts throughout history and across culture and media. In one chapter, for instance, he discusses Wislawa Szymborska's poem "Maybe All This," which describes (among other things) the delight that angels -- in the form of Cartesian "Evil Geniuses" looking at test tubes inside of which all life on earth exists -- experience when they see one of us at work in our tiny labors:

...

Look! on the big screen a little girl
is sewing a button on her sleeve.
The radar shrieks,
the staff comes at a run.
What a darling little being
with its tiny heart beating inside it!
How sweet, its solemn
threading of the needle!
Someone cries enraptured;
Get the Boss,
tell him he's got to see this for himself!

The poem reminds Weschsler, rightly, of Vermeer's "The Lacemaker" from 1669:


I didn't have either the poem or Vermeer in mind when I saw this scene on the subway (several weeks before reading Weschler), but something about the sign's reference to "tiny hands" and the couple's analogous gesture -- though he is merely playing with his I-pod, she's actually sewing or knitting! -- now makes me want to continue Weschler's riff:


It's not a great photograph, to be sure, but "brain farts" can have a delight of their own . . . .