Metaphor and Reality

To speak forth honestly is to report the world as it is beheld (however precariously) in one's own perspective. Things have contexts, but only a person has perspectives. The essential excuse for writing, then, is to unveil as best one can some perspective that has not already become ordered into a public map. The present book is concerned with the kind of writing that is radically perspectival. All writing, to be sure, is perspectival in the most general sense; for even the most banal cliché or the most plainly factual report is formulated from a certain standpoint, and represents a certain trend of associations and expectations. The difference is not between the perspectival and the universal; for every universal, at least every humanly intelligible universal, is perspectivally conceived. No, the
difference is between perspectives that have become standardized and perspectives that are freshly born and individual. The latter are perspectives in the making, rather than perspectives already publicly established; it is with them that the following pages are concerned.