on perspectives

- A steady hand! he said, and drank down the brandy. - Do you think that's all it is, a steady hand? He opened the rumpled reproduction. - This...these...the art historians and the critics talking about every object and...everything having its own form and density...its own character in Flemish paintings, but is that all there is to it? Do you know why everything does? Because they found God everywhere. There was nothing God did not watch over, nothing and so this...and so in the painting every detail reflects...God's concern with the most insignificant objects in life, with everything, because God did not relax for an instant then, and neither could the painter then. Do you get the perspective in this? he demanded, thrusting the rumpled reproduction before them. - There isn't any. There isn't any single perspective, like the camera eye, the one we all look through now and call it realism, there...I take five or six or ten...the Flemish painter took twenty perspectives if he wished, and even in a small painting you can't include it all in your single vision, your one miserable pair of eyes, like you can a photograph, like you can painting when it...when it degenerates, and becomes conscious of being looked at.
Recktall Brown stood up, and came toward him.
- Like everything today is conscious of being looked at, looked at by something else but not by God, and that's the only way anything can have its own form and its own character, and...and shape and smell, being looked at by God.

William Gaddis, The Recognitions