#winter journal

You can't see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether strangers or friends or the most intimate beloveds, your own face is invisible to you... We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

“You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.”

You can't see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether friends or strangers or the most intimate beloveds, your own face is invisible to you. You can see other parts of yourself, arms and legs, hands and feet, shoulders and torso, but only from the front, nothing of the back except the backs of your legs if you twist them in the right position, but not your face, never your face, and in the end -at least as far as others are concerned- your face is you are, the essential fact of your identity. Passports do not contain pictures of hands and feet. Even you, who have lived inside your body for sixty-four years now, would probably be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to speak of your ear, or your elbow, or one of your eyes in close-up. All so familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others. Think of what happened to you when you were fourteen. For two weeks at the end of summer, your worked for your father in Jersey City, joining one of the small crews that repaired and maintained the apartment buildings he and his brothers owned and managed: painting walls and ceilings, mending roofs, hammering nails into two-by-fours, pulling up sheets of cracked of linoleum. The two men you worked with were black, every tenant in every apartment was black, every person in the neighborhood was black, and after two weeks of looking at nothing but black faces, you began to forget that your own face wasn't black. Since you couldn't see your own face, you saw yourself in the faces of the people around you, and bit by bit you stopped thinking of yourself as different. In effect, you stopped thinking about yourself at all.