Photo by Danny Clinch
“I cannot live without books.” -TJ
Thomas Jefferson’s personal collection, Library of Congress.
![7/23/2011 Washington, DC
“People of color.”
Ironic, I am reading Invisible Man the week that I visit a city with more unlike faces, more blended communities, more colors than I have yet seen.
[So if the ideal of achieving a true political equality eludes us in reality—as it continues to do—there is still available that fictional vision of an ideal democracy in which the actual combines with the ideal and gives us representations of a state of things in which the highly placed and the lowly, the black and the white, the northerner and the southerner, the native-born and the immigrant are combined to tell us of transcendent truths and possibilities such as those discovered when Mark Twain set Huck and Jim afloat on the raft.]
A person who is not a “people of color” would be a “non colored,” yes? So then the NCLR president, the Latinas across the table, the attractive black man sitting to my right, each would agree that I do not have the right to consider myself, or to check the box that says “people of color,” correct? [nor would I argue their misguidance.] Therefore I am a “non colored.” A person without color? As I say it, as I lower my head in defeat, in shameful acceptance, I am filled with a defiant… what? Jealousy? Urge to defend myself? To compensate?
[A man of two worlds, my pilot felt himself to be misperceived in both and thus was at ease in neither.]
I am white. (I am white?) Am I allowed to relate to this pilot, this black man?
I am drawn to diversity. Of those different from myself. When one wishes to add “diversity” among us, who would be chosen last? Or next to last, just before the white man?
I love color. Everything wants and feels to burst with shades of turquoise, of amber, of gold, emerald, indigo. Of white? I want more color. A permanency. Una mezcla.
[America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.]
[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.]
-Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lps3tgGNDK1qdv46qo1_250.jpg)
7/23/2011 Washington, DC
“People of color.”
Ironic, I am reading Invisible Man the week that I visit a city with more unlike faces, more blended communities, more colors than I have yet seen.
[So if the ideal of achieving a true political equality eludes us in reality—as it continues to do—there is still available that fictional vision of an ideal democracy in which the actual combines with the ideal and gives us representations of a state of things in which the highly placed and the lowly, the black and the white, the northerner and the southerner, the native-born and the immigrant are combined to tell us of transcendent truths and possibilities such as those discovered when Mark Twain set Huck and Jim afloat on the raft.]
A person who is not a “people of color” would be a “non colored,” yes? So then the NCLR president, the Latinas across the table, the attractive black man sitting to my right, each would agree that I do not have the right to consider myself, or to check the box that says “people of color,” correct? [nor would I argue their misguidance.] Therefore I am a “non colored.” A person without color? As I say it, as I lower my head in defeat, in shameful acceptance, I am filled with a defiant… what? Jealousy? Urge to defend myself? To compensate?
[A man of two worlds, my pilot felt himself to be misperceived in both and thus was at ease in neither.]
I am white. (I am white?) Am I allowed to relate to this pilot, this black man?
I am drawn to diversity. Of those different from myself. When one wishes to add “diversity” among us, who would be chosen last? Or next to last, just before the white man?
I love color. Everything wants and feels to burst with shades of turquoise, of amber, of gold, emerald, indigo. Of white? I want more color. A permanency. Una mezcla.
[America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.]
[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.]
-Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
my new room.
Yes. I was infatuated with you; I still am. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn’t stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any of those.
Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit it openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worse, returned. But one thing about human beings that puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within.
(Source: sheloveswords, via literarynerd)
books are real
(Source: booksarereal)
