The aim of describing things just as they appear will always fall short because things don't just appear, are never just presented, and if this is how we take them to be at certain privileged times, so that painters might seem to have captured them just so, this is a result of factors outside of the putative presentation, and these moments of realism will turn out to have been brief epochs in a restless history of artifice. To say that something is simply present is also to imply that what it is present to is simple and distinct and unpresented, entirely and in principle outside of presentation - this is in the grammar of the term. Consider it then with different terms: often what appears is more correctly what is suffered. A sort of physiology or physiognomy of the sufferer is implicit in the event, a disposition felt but not entirely self-conscious. Looking back on the history of seeing things as they are we see a succession of dispositions which only have in common that each one presumes it has finally freed itself of the previous one. There is a palpable weight to dispositions which we both welcome and resist. To be influenced by someone, to find oneself drawn to share his or her point of view, may be more a result of the transfer of dispositions than of anything pointed out in the objective. Each conversation as it proceeds crystallises its own distinct world of meanings, more or less shared even if the partners disagree. We suffer in common, this is how we conceive shared objects, compassion is not a more urbane version of pity, but a communicational subcarrier of enormous speed and bandwidth.