Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint Art Novels & Stories

The quietness of it had a different quality from the quietness of an empty room - the quality of something that has been said and cannot be unsaid, of a direction chosen that has closed the alternative directions behind it. I sat back down and opened my laptop. I went to the article. Not searching for weaknesses in it, not looking for the sentence that could be challenged or the paragraph that could be reframed. I read it as a reader would - as someone encountering it without prior knowledge of the person at its center, without any investment in how it reflected on anyone in particular. She had not named me.

he says. "The whole city the way you feel it," I say. "Not the way a drawing usually works — one subject, one frame. The way the city is." I pause. "The cartographer made a two-dimensional map. Senna made three-dimensional frameworks. You have been reading cities in a fourth dimension since before you knew you were reading anything." I look at his hand. "Draw in the dimension you actually perceive." He looks at the sketchpad. He opens it. He begins.

"The city is harder. It moves. The olive tree holds still." "The city holds still if you find the right angle," I said. "The part of it that doesn't change." She looked at the view with the assessing quality I recognised from the office — the artist's eye, the person who was always doing two things at once, looking and translating the looking into something else. "Maybe," she said.