[Walking Through Rain - Jersey Yen]But imagine yourself in pieces.
Imagine all the people who have known you for only a year or a month or a single encounter, imagine those people in a room together trying to assemble a portrait of you, the way an archaeologist puts together the fragments of a ruined facade, or the bones of a caveman. Do you remember the fable of the seven blind men and the elephant?
It's not that easy, after all, to know what you're made up of.
Imagine the parts of yourself disassembled; imagine, for example, that nothing is left of you but a severed hand in an ice cooler. Perhaps there is one of your loved ones who could identify even this small piece. Here: the lines of your palm. The texture of your knuckles and wrinkled skin at the joints in the middle of your fingers. Calluses, scars. The shape of your nails.
-Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply
2 comments:
Beautiful. Almost like Hoffman but more sad.
I love his diction, i mean seriously, this is about computer hacking and identity theft... well, among other things--like how we establish identity and how it can be taken or left behind...
"Meanwhile, the invaders are busy carrying away small pieces of you, tidbit of information you hardly think about, any more than you think about the flakes of skin that are drifting off you constantly..."
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