![]() How shocked they’d be! I’d push them into a side street and smear their faces with the peel. If only someone who had known me at school or at home would come along and see me now. To hell with all that, and as sweet as the yam actually was, it became like nectar with the thought. I no longer had to worry about who saw me or about what was proper. I walked along, munching the yam, just as suddenly overcome by an intense feeling of freedom -simply because I was eating while walking along the street. I took a bite, finding it as sweet and hot as any I’d ever had, and was overcome with such a surge of homesickness that I turned away to keep my control. ![]() You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike outwith your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. Then too, you’re constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a bio-chemical accident to my epidermis. 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 invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. ![]() I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -and I might even be said to possess a mind. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. Invisible man - Ralph Ellison From Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison Prologue ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |