“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.
Aren’t we all familiar with the feeling of isolation from our family and friends, of our own generation even? At times, we feel like we are so individually different, like we don’t “fit in” because we understand things differently, feel things differently. Maybe it’s because we have the kind of shoes that our parents find distasteful, or that we listen to objectionable genres of music. *Even among fans of the same type of music (say, K-Pop) heavily criticize each other for their preferred fandoms. For non-believers though, all K-Pop fans are the same – because they are looking from “two thousand feet away”.
What if we are all actually the same? Would accepting that do us more good than evil? Looking at the big picture, maybe we already belong where we thought we didn’t.
*I can use this example confidently because I used to be heavily involved in the K-Pop fandom.
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