Got to be good looking 'cause he's so hard to see

[learnedax]

The ultimate in disposing one's troops is to be without ascertainable shape. Then the most penetrating spies cannot pry in nor can the wise lay plans against you.

Someone once told me that I was, to paraphrase, an open book in a foreign language.

I don't think that I am a particularly private person, and there's little I won't happily talk about - but I can believe that it is nonetheless hard to get a handle on me. Very few people really know me that well, even knowing so much about me. And then I wonder how well any of us knows each other. If I could see inside your mind, would I really know you better, or would I just know better how little I know you? Maybe our brains are just wired so differently that seeing someone else's thoughts laid out before us we still couldn't figure out why they think the things they do. Or maybe we really all think alike, and we're just much more subtle and coy than I give us credit for. I don't know which would be sadder.

Either way we seem nearly as good at hiding from ourselves. We may be excellent liars to ourselves, or we may know ourselves completely and still not understand us. Maybe both. We certainly make finding ourselves hard.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

The contradiction/distinction occurs if you assume that a person is something that you can understand in totality, like a formula or a sentence. A view that doesn't promote this idea is therefore, to me, more realistic and less frustrating...

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Fair enough.

I think that there's nothing about people that theoretically prevents them from being understood in totality -- but the entity doing the understanding would have to be considerably posthuman :-)