Background

It was an accumulating series of comments.

First was a passage in the soon-to-be-released novel, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society:

I have been looking at a book about artists and how they size up a picture they want to paint. Say they want to concentrate on an orange -- do they study the shape direct? No, they don’t. They fool their eyes and stare at the banana beside it, […] They see the orange in a brand-new way. It’s called getting perspective.

Similarly, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future suggested that while my left brain is busy analyzing something, my right brain takes in the essence of what I’m really interested in -- the something else.

Then there was someone’s passing comment -- that she always pays more attention to the extras in a scene than to the stars.

So I'm interested: that man on the very far right.*

What’s his story?


* photographed at the International Museum of Surgical Science