While Rodin closed himself to what is unimportant, he was open to reality, where "animals and people... touch him like things". Like a continually receptive lover, nothing escapes him, and as a craftsman he has a concentrated "way of looking." There is nothing "uncertain for him in an object that serves him as a model... The object is definite, the art-object must be even more definite, withdrawn from all chance and removed from all ambiguity, lifted out of time and given to space, it has become permanent, capable of eternity. The model "seems", the art-object "is"."