The real sting here is that our subjectivity isn't a minor filter we could clean if we tried harder—it's the very machinery of perception itself, baked in irreversibly. Nin isn't simply noting that bias exists (that's the obvious reading), but rather that the self is always the lens, meaning two people studying the identical sunset don't just *interpret* it differently; they literally *see* different things. Consider how a parent and teenager observe the same family dinner: one sees an opportunity for connection, the other sees surveillance—and neither is hallucinating; each genuinely perceives what their inner life has prepared them to notice. This is why arguments about "what really happened" often deadlock so completely; we're not disagreeing about facts so much as reporting on our own internal weather.