Exercises

1. Two separate paragraphs. Consider some actual or imagined room. In your first paragraph, describe the room’s interior from some vantage point outside it, e.g., through an open door, window, a skylight, etc. Then, in your second paragraph, describe what the viewer sees looking outward from within the room, through the same aperture. The task of your prose here will be to make each paragraph cohere, and, if possible, to coordinate the ways in which each characterizes the room. In either case, the nature of the room (its size and contents) will help to condition what is seen in it or from it.

2. Take another room, real or imaginary. Again in two separate but connected paragraphs, describe the interior from the point of view of (a) someone intimately familiar with that room and (b) of a stranger, someone who is seeing it for the first time. A moment’s thought about this will make you realize that a major decision about the writing of these paragraphs will be one about the implicit purpose of the account: for example, why does someone describe something he or she knows well, and to whom?

3. Choose a pair of objects of phenomena you consider to be polar or antithetical (for example: sun-moon, night-day, mountain-valley, dog-cat, lion-unicorn, acid-base, land- sea, water-wine, body-soul, fish-fowl). Take the part of one of them, and speaking, either in the first person or (recording discourse indirectly) in the third, comment on the opposing member of the pair: i.e., write as sun about moon, or vice-versa. This will demand that you have a firm sense of the possibly complex relation between the two members of the pair, and that you express that sense in revealing the attitudes of one toward the other.

4. Now (naturally) vice-versa. You have spoken from the point of view of x on the subject of y. Now speak from the point of view of y on the subject of x.

5. Now choose some third element (z) that is equidistant from the other two, existing apart from, beyond, or out of range of, the polarization between them. Let z speak on the nature of the opposition between x and y–on the virtues and/or shortcomings of what x and y have said, on whether y, who spoke last, really does have the last word, on any special knowledge z thinks it has about x and y. (For instance: earth on sun-moon, air on land-sea, eagle on lion-unicorn…) This new point of view might well seem strongly objective, but to what extent might distance be a mask for subjectivity?

Point of View: Examples

1) Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. It was well for her she had not to attend the ladies also. But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and converted the bathroom upstairs into a ladies’ dressing-room. Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there, gossiping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the head of the stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to ask her who had come.

It was a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia’s choir, and of Kate’s pupils that were grown up enough and even some of Mary Jane’s pupils too. Never once had it fallen flat…
(Joyce, “The Dead”)

2)
Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care;
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in Hells despair.

So sang a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattles feet;
But a pebble of the brook,
Warbled out these metres meet.

Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight:
Joys in anothers loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heavens despite.
(William Blake, “The Clod and the Pebble”)

3) Great buildings often have great doors; but great doors are heavy to swing, and if left open they may let in too much cold or glare; so that we sometimes observe a small postern cut into one leaf of the large door for more convenient entrance and exit, and it is seldom or never that the monumental gates yawn in their somnolence. Here is the modest human scale reasserting itself in the midst of a titanic structure, but it reasserts itself with an ill grace and in the interests of frailty; the patch it makes seems unintended and ignominious.

Yet the human scale is not essentially petty; when it does not. slip in as a sort of interloper it has nothing to apologize for. Between the infinite and the infinitesimal all sizes are equally central. The Greeks, the Saracens, the English, the Chinese and Japanese instinctively retain the human scale in all that part of their work which is most characteristic of them and nearest to their affections. A Greek temple or the hall of an English mansion can be spacious and dignified enough, but they do not outrun familiar uses, and they lend their spaciousness and dignity to the mind, instead of crushing it. Everything about them has an air of friendliness and sufficiency; their elegance is not pompous, and if they are noble, they are certainly not vast, cold, nor gilded.
(George Santayana, “Soliloquies in England”)

4) The eye and its retinal elements have ranges of magnitude and limitations of magnitude of their own. A big dog’s eye is hardly bigger than a little dog’s; a squirrel’s is much larger, proportionately, than an elephant’s; and a robin’s is but little less than a pigeon’s or a crow’s. For the rods and cones do not vary with the size of the animal, but have their dimensions optically limited by the interference-patterns of the waves of light, which set bounds to the production of clear retinal images. True, the larger animal may want a larger field of view; but this makes little difference, for but a small area of the retina is ever needed or used. The eye, in short, can never be very small and need never be very big; it has its own conditions and limitations apart from the size of the animal. But the insect’s eye tells another story. If a fly had an eye like ours, the pupil would be so small that diffraction would render a clear image impossible. The only alternative is to unite a number of small and optically isolated simple eyes into a compound eye, and in the insect Nature adopts this alternative possibility.
(D’Arcy W. Thompson, Growth and Form)

5) If one wanted to show a foreigner England, perhaps the wisest course would be to take him to the final section of the Purbeck Hills, and stand him on their summit, a few miles to the east of Corfe. Then system after system of our island would roll together under his feet. Beneath him is the valley of the Frome, and all the wild lands that come tossing down from Dorchester, black and gold, to mirror their gorse in the expanses of Poole. The valley of the Stour is beyond, unaccountable stream, dirty at Blandford, pure at Wimborne–the Stour, sliding out of fat fields, to marry the Avon beneath the tower of Christchurch. The valley of the Avon–invisible, but far to the north the trained eye may see Clearbury Ring that guards it, and the imagination may leap beyond that on to Salisbury Plain itself, and beyond the Plain to all the glorious downs of Central England. Nor is Suburbia absent. Bournemouth’s ignoble coast cowers to the right, heralding the pinetrees that mean, for all their beauty, red houses and the Stock Exchange, and extend to the gates of London itself. So tremendous is the City’s trail! But the cliffs of Freshwater it shall never touch, and the island will guard the Island’s purity till the end of time. Seen from the west, the Wight is beautiful beyond all laws of beauty. It is as if a fragment of England floated forward to greet the foreigner–chalk of our chalk, turf of our turf, epitome of what will follow. …How many villages appear in this view! How many castles! How many churches, vanished or triumphant! How many ships railways, and roads! What incredible variety of men working beneath that lucent sky to what final end! The reason fails, like a wave on the Swanage beach; the imagination swells, spreads, and deepens, until it becomes geographic and encircles England.
(E.M. Forster, Howards End)

6) For, to speak generally, whatever can with truth be called a self,…such as individuals and persons must be, is not a mere centre or point of reference for consciousness or action attributed to it, everything else, all that it is conscious of or acts on being its object only and outside it….If the centre of reference spoken of has concentric circles around it, one of these, the inmost, say, is its own, is of it, the rest are to it only. Within a certain bounding line all will be self, outside of it nothing: with it self begins from one side and ends from the other. I look through my eye and the window and the air; the eye is my eye and of me and me, the unclear pane is my windowpane and not of me nor me. A self then will consist of a centre and a surrounding area or circumference, of a point of reference and a belonging field, the latter set out, as surveyors etc say, from the former, of two elements which we may call the inset and the outsetting or display. Now this applies to the universal mind or being too; it will have its inset and its outsetting; only that the outsetting includes all things, with all of which it is in some way, by turns, in a series, or however it is, identified.
(Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Comments on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola,” Notes and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins)

7) It seemed to me that I was high up in space. Far below I saw the globe of the earth, bathed in a gloriously blue light. I saw the deep blue sea and the continents. Far below my feet lay Ceylon, and in the distance ahead of me the subcontinent of India. My field of vision did not include the whole earth, but its global shape was plainly distinguishable and its outlines shone with a silvery gleam through that wonderful blue light. In many places the globe seemed colored, spotted dark green like oxidized silver. Far away to the left lay a broad expanse–the reddish-yellow desert of Arabia; it was as though the silver of the earth had there assumed a reddish-gold hue. Then came the Red Sea, and far, far back–as if in the upper left of a map- -I could just make out a bit of the Mediterranean. My gaze was directed chiefly toward that. Everything else appeared indistinct. I could also see the snow-covered Himalayas, but in that direction it was foggy or cloudy. I did not look to the right at all. I knew that I was on the point of departing from the earth.

Later I discovered how high in space one would have to be to have so extensive a view–approximately a thousand miles! The sight of earth from this height was the most glorious thing I had ever seen.

After contemplating it for a while, I turned around. I had been standing with my back to the Indian Ocean, as it were, and my face to the north. Then it seemed to me that I made a turn to the south. Something new entered my field of vision. A short distance away I saw in space a tremendous dark block of stone, like a meteorite. It was about the size of my house, or even bigger. It was floating in space, and I myself was floating in space.
(Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections)

8) Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.
(Austen, Pride and Prejudice)