Opacity Quotes

“Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.”

“Under opacity and in the newfound complexity of the world, people can hide risks and hurt others, with the law incapable of catching them. Iatrogenics has both delayed and invisible consequences. It is hard to see causal links, to fully understand what’s going on.Under such epistemic limitations, skin in the game is the only true mitigator of fragility.”

“It’s so interesting how transparency works. Not only can you see yourself when you open, relax, show up fully, and allow vulnerability to be natural, but that empowers others to see more of you—and of themselves. On the other hand, when you’re open, exposed, and undefended without even trying, you can see through layers of interference or illusions of opacity in people and situations that used to stop you. You have Superman’s X-ray vision!" —from Transparency: Seeing Through to Our Expanded Human Capacity”

“It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity... How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced – and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation.”

“Memories are fragile, you try to grab them and they skitter away in various directions. Trying to gather them together to write them out is difficult, they resist, get clouded and escape as wisps of smoke. Nothing seems as crystal clear as it once was, a milky film of opacity envelopes everything. Odd details stand out in one’s mind, not a continuum. A fragrance, an odour, the smell of toast burning perhaps or whiff of jasmine, a shade of pink, a flower pressed between the pages of a book, brings on a sharp burst of memories that drown you with their immediacy.”

“The opacity of the mind, its inability to project itself into the realm of another's personality, goes a long way to explain the friction of life. If we would set down other people's errors to this rather than to malice prepense we should not only get more good out of life and feel more kindly toward our fellows, but doubtless the rectitude of our intellects would increase, and the justice of our judgments...we are so shut away from one another that none tells those about him what he considers ideal treatment on their part toward him...nothing will probe to the core of this greatest disadvantage under which we labor--that is, mutual noncomprehension--except a basis of society and government which would make it easy for each to put himself in another's place because his place is so much like another's...we [would] need less imagination in order to do that which is just and kind to every one about us.”

“Surely some revelation is at hand.”

“Those who generate fog are Wizards of Oz hoping desperately that nobody pulls the curtain to reveal a trembling little writer behind it. This seldom happens. Readers who dare to point out that incomprehensible writing can't be comprehended risk being told that the problem is theirs.”