Mustafa:
[taking Ego's order] Do you know what you'd like this evening, sir?
Anton Ego:
Yes, I think I do. After reading a lot of overheated puffery about your new cook, you know what I'm craving? A little perspective. That's it. I'd like some fresh, clear, well seasoned perspective. Can you suggest a good wine to go with that?
Mustafa:
With what, sir?
Anton Ego:
Perspective. Fresh out, I take it?
Mustafa:
I am, uh...
Anton Ego:
Very well. Since you're all out of perspective and no one else seems to have it in this BLOODY TOWN, I'll make you a deal. You provide the food, I'll provide the perspective, which would go nicely with a bottle of Cheval Blanc 1947.
Mustafa:
I'm afraid... your dinner selection?
Anton Ego:
[stands up angrily] Tell your chef Linguini that I want whatever he dares to serve me. Tell him to hit me with his best SHOT.
What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be
Geoffrey Lennox:
Just look at you three brothers. Just look at you. Together. You. You little black stove-pipe-colored nigga, Tasty. You are the same complexion as Marcus Garvey, the man that brought self-love to the black consciousness movement in the 1930s. And when we speak about complexion, we move into the political perspective of where y'all coming from. You, Ice. You's a good, high-yellow piss-colored motherfucker. Same complexion as Bob Marley. I mean, you even got that dreadlock thing going for you. You could even move into a whole Rasta thing, if you wanted to. But that's another story. And you. You good red-boned, morani-colored, genie-in-a-bottle-looking motherfucker. You are the same complexion as Malcom X. That's right. Take off your hat. Jeeze! Red hair, just like Malcom! Boy, I'm telling you, you brothers are gonna be large! But like I said, you got to be careful. Because y'all are telling the truth, and the white man don't want you all saying what you're saying.
Terry:
You mind if I ask you a personal question?
Rudy:
I don't know.
Terry:
Do you like it here, I mean in Scottsville?
Rudy:
Yeah.
Terry:
Why?
Rudy:
I don't know, my friends are here, I like the scenery... I don't know.
Terry:
I know, I know, it's just so... there's nothing to do here.
Rudy:
Yes, there is.
Terry:
No, there isn't, man. It's narrow. It's dull. It's a dull, narrow town full of dull, narrow people who don't know anything except what things are like right around here. They have no perspective whatsoever, no scope. They might as well be living in the 19th century 'cause they have no idea what's going on, and if you try and tell 'em that they wanna fucking kill you.
Rudy:
What are you talking about?
Terry:
I have no idea... you're a good kid.
The perception of other people and the intersubjective world is problematic only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. He has no awares of himself or of others as private subjectives, nor does he suspect that all of us, himself included, are limited to one certain point of view of the world. That is why he subjects neither his thoughts, in which he believes as they present themselves, to any sort of criticism. He has no knowledge of points of view. For him men are empty heads turned towards one single, self-evident world where everything takes place, even dreams, which are, he thinks, in his room, and even thinking, since it is not distinct from words.
Oh, why does compassion weaken us?'
It doesn't, really...Somewhere where it all balances out-don't the philosophers have a name for it, the perfect place, the place where the answers live?-if we could go there, you could see it doesn't.It only looks, a little bit, like it does, from here, like an ant at the foot of an oak tree. He doesn't have a clue that it's a tree; it's the beginning of the wall round the world, to him.
