“A nearsighted man standing two feet away from the wall of a house and staring at it, would declare that the map of the city’s street is an artificial, invented contrivance. That is not what an airplane pilot would say, flying two thousand feet above a city.”
Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto, 1969.
IN her essay Basic Principles of Literature, Ayn Rand used this analogy to explain the objectivity of the “observer’s viewpoint”. In simpler terms, looking at things too closely might make the details lose their meanings, but taking a step back and taking in things as a whole could give us a different perspective altogether.
