Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”
“I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. 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, simply because people refuse to see me.”
Ralph Ellison
This quote, from Ellison's famous novel The Invisible Man which turns 60 years old this month, I saw quoted twice on Tuesday, and in fact after not reading it at all for decades, I read that final sentence of the quote twice within a couple of minutes. It was noted by a reader on Andrew Sullivan's blog in response to his description of how the Rabid Right project their fears etc. onto President Obama, the other is a very interesting piece in the New Yorker about the controversy over how some readers/viewers are reacting to black characters in The Hunger Games. Some are surprised (and then dismayed) that a couple of characters are black. It seems race, the present and the apocalypse are very much tied together. Anyway, it seems the meanginful coincidence itself selected this as the Dreaming Up Daily Quote for today.
The painting is The Solidity of Fog by the Italian Futurist painter Russolo.
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