Unable to process what was happening, the child, usually a girl, dissociated, or split her consciousness off from her experience, and observed herself from a distance.
An overfilled bus slowed to admire the Americans' bad luck, and Julia observed herself as if from the crowded window, a bottle-blond woman dethroned, removed to the gutter in her goofy pedal pushers and daisy-topped flip-flops.
Doreen's strength is that she always thinks from first principles, observing herself and her lover very exactly.
The new perspective has some odd results: would the average teenage girl observe herself running her fingers through her own "shoulder-length strawberry blond hair"?
She observes, as one character puts it, like "a little green-eyed cat", "a cat studying mice", but she is also observing herself, a young woman as an object.
Blue Nights is a horrifying documentary of a writer observing herself in the moment of dissolution, when she can't remember how to write, can't wholly remember who she is.
Fisher's life, which ended far too soon, was one of rare and unbelievable circumstances, and thank goodness she had the wit and the chutzpah to tell us all about it — as if she were observing herself from a ten-foot remove, and as if we were her best friends, who for some reason deserved the unvarnished truth.
The video provides the show with a dynamic background, but it also neatly symbolizes the self-consciousness of Sontag's writing process: even as she confides her most intimate secrets to the page, she observes herself doing so, aware that the journal is more than a mere record of experience, but a tool she is consciously employing to shape it.
From observing herself and others, Bowlin has pinpointed the reasons most people keep themselves stuck in sabotage, suffering, struggle, separation and stress.
While Ms. Winehouse had many songwriting collaborators on "Frank," her lyrics already showed her acerbic, unsparing eye on both the people she observed and herself.
She had observed this herself at Buildwas, on the winding Severn in Shropshire, where between Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon the flooding river drained from the land "as if a plug had been pulled out".
