I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
