Re: AtD translation: Kit gazed at, or perhaps into, the tie’s ultra-modern design

[Joseph Tracy]

To my thought the most obvious difference is that 'gaze at' implies a surface, like the surface arrangement of shapes colors on the tie material perceived fundamentally as a plane, and 'gaze into' implies perceiving the painting  as a 3 dimensional space, a world. This shift in perception is fairly common. There are no actual planes, points or lines, they are imaginary dimensional shifts and mathematical models yet one cannot imagine sight without planes. Our relation to these dimensional shifts of perception are a major concern of the novel. Later we look into gelatin silver prints via Merle and friend’s special process and the space becomes 4 dimensional to include time. 
   There may be an implication in this that Einstein’s spacetime or something with even more dimensions is the only knowable and realistic understanding and all gazes ‘at’ are a narrowed abstraction, a mathematical trick, a limited view, the position without velocity or direction, the limits of what we can see or perceive due to the relativity implied in measurement.   

> On Aug 6, 2021, at 10:40 PM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> P623.35-624.6   . . . and a vivid necktie in fuchsia, heliotrope, and duck
> green, a gift from one of the patients, as the Doc presently explained in a
> voice hoarse from too much cigarette-smoking, “Hand-painted, as therapy, to
> express, though regrettably not control, certain recurring impulses of a
> homicidal nature.”
>       Kit gazed at, or perhaps into, the tie’s ultra-modern design, in
> which its disturbed artist had failed to include much of anything
> encountered in the natural world—yet, who knew? maybe if you studied it
> long enough, familiar shapes might begin to emerge, some in fact what you
> might call, what was the word, entertaining—
> 
> What exactly is the distinction between "gaze at" and "gaze into" here?
> --
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