At times, it means the possibility of viewing life with detachment, as a thing other than just an accumulation of appetites.
We experience this sense of fracture so deeply that we ascribe it to machines that, viewed with retrospective detachment, don't seem remotely capable of producing it.
"Until quite recently, the rebellion of youth could be viewed with the detachment usually accorded anything so common and natural," the late Dr. Robert M. Lindner, author of "Rebel Without a Cause," a psychiatric study that is connected with the movie only by its name, told a Los Angeles audience four years ago.
It is entirely caught up in the individuality of its heroine, who is viewed with affectionate detachment, and in the details of her environment, which are given a romantic lift by Sam Levy's supple, shadowy monochrome cinematography and a musical soundtrack borrowed mostly from the great French film composer Georges Delerue.
This ability to feel what others feel, and simultaneously to view it with detachment, gives us perhaps our greatest strength as writers.
However great its historical significance, it will at some future point be possible to view it with detachment, much as we now look back at the French revolution.
Do you view them with detachment, as isolated moments in time, or do you often empathize with or wonder about the people in them?
Mylne in particular seems to have viewed Reid with detachment.
Viewed with detachment, however, repeated mirror trades suggest a sustained plot to shift and hide money of possibly dubious origin.
The Polish director has imposed a surreal ambience that widens its emotional distance from characters who are viewed with the same clinical detachment as the moths fluttering around the lamps inside the crumbling manor house.
He and his father had never been close and had viewed each other with detachment since Arnold was in kindergarten.
