for the reader’s; I present those highlights I want him to observe and leave him no room to focus on anything else. His awareness will then follow as if the material were actual reality. But he will be observing reality as I observe it—i.e., from my viewpoint, according to my value choice. (He can then decide what he thinks of these values, which is a different, private matter.)
My writing is both highly slanted and objective. It is slanted in that I select the focus; it is objective in that I do not tell the reader what to see or feel. I show it.
If I have an unimportant connecting sentence such as “They walked toward the car,” that is telling, not showing—but then, by virtue of the matter’s unimportance, there is nothing to show. Given the selectivity of human perception, this is how you do in fact experience a transition. If, in the middle of an important conversation, you are walking toward a car, you are aware, barely, of your direction; but that is not where your focus is. I use the same method to choose my content and my words.
I do not present the reader with anything but direct sensory evidence. The author, in my style, never speaks—yet the author is consciously pulling every string. I give the reader nothing but concrete, objective facts—slanted in such a way that he will have only the impression I intend him to have.
From Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo [translated by Ayn Rand]
From that day on, there was in me a man whom I did not know. I tried to use all my remedies, the cloister, the altar, the work, the books. Folly! Oh! science rings so hollow when one beats against it in despair a head full of passion! Do you know, young girl, what I always saw thenceforth between the book and me? You, your shadow, the image of the luminous apparition that had once moved across the space before me. But that image did not have the same color any longer; it was somber, ominous, dark like the black circle that pursues for a long time the sight of the reckless one who has looked fixedly at the sun.
Unable to get rid of it, always hearing your song humming in my head, always seeing your feet dancing on my prayer book, always feeling at night, in dreams, your shape slipping against my flesh, I wanted to see you again, to touch you, to know who you were, to see whether I would find you comparable to the ideal image I had kept of you, to shatter my dream perhaps by means of reality. In any case, I hoped that a new impression would efface the first, and the first had become unbearable to me. I sought you. I saw you again. Disasier! When I had seen you twice, I wished to see you a thousand times, I wished to see you always. Then—how can one stop on that steep descent into hell?—then I did not belong to myself any longer. The other end of the string that the devil had attached to my wings, he had tied it to your foot. I became a vagrant like you. I waited for you in doorways, I looked for you on street comers, I watched you from the top of my tower. Each evening, I returned to myself more charmed, more desperate, more bewitched, more lost! ...
Oh, young girl, have pity on me! You believe that you are unhappy, alas! alas! you do not know what unhappiness is. Oh! to love a woman! to be a priest! to be hated! to love her with all the fury of one’s soul, to feel that for the least of her smiles one would give one’s blood, one’s guts, one’s character, one’s salvation, immortality and eternity, this life and the next; to regret that one is not king, genius, emperor, archangel, God, that one might place a greater slave under her feet; to embrace her night and day with one’s dreams and with one’s thoughts; and to see her enamored of a soldier’s uniform! and to have nothing to offer her but the squalid cassock of a priest that will arouse her fear and her disgust! ... Do you know what it’s like, that agony you are made to endure, through the long nights, by your arteries that boil, by your heart that bursts, by your head that splits, by your teeth that bite your hands;