The Pages Are Not Blank

"In town like this people read you like a book that they've only thought of opening."

I’ve always been on the lookout for great quotations.  Sometimes they are one line poetry.  And if they make me think, not simply reinforcing some commonplace with which I am already too comfortable….

So, Martin Hyatt in A Scarecrow’s Bible, “In towns like this, people read you like a book that they’ve only thought of opening.”

Yes, we are too often glossed over, shelved with pages unturned.  And what is worse, “assumed.”  Think about this for a moment.  The commonplace idea is that we typecast and are typecasted.  The quotation, though, gets at the losses we experience.  A book should be read.  A person should be known.  And we don’t need to live by the assumption that we know all about people and “case closed,” book shelved.

When we fail to experience the richness of the lives around us, we are prone to see ourselves as either superior beings or through the same conforming lens. 

A news column today spoke of the gargoyle phenomena.  Present identity partisanship both narrows our frame of reference (we stick with our “kind”) and provides a distorting glass through with “the other” is not just a stock character in a B film, but a crazy and slightly less human gargoyle. 

It starts with human illiteracy.  It ends with doubting that some group’s vote should really be counted.