A man came up to me the other day and said he hadn't had a bite in weeks. So you know what I did? I walked by him like he didn't even exist.
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He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.
I was walking along looking for somebody, and then suddenly I wasn't anymore.
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Then the exception would be as if he did not exist at all.
Act as if you don't know me, and i will make it seem as though you don't exist.
In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away did he suddenly rise upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there.
I never knew I was there, either.
For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired to electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, “When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.
"<i>There was once an invisible man who had grown tired of being unseen. It was not that he was <b>actually</b> invisible. It was that people had become used to not seeing him.
And if no one sees you, are you really there at all?"</i>
After everything that happened, how could I miss him? But I did, I did.
For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence, and that I stood there alone, the last man left alive.
He looked as though his life had not only passed him by but paused along the way to spit in his face.
So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight - watching over nothing.
I could not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me.
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His absence is so big it's like he's there.
Sometimes I see him as just another person, and sometimes I feel the sight of him in my gut, like a deep ache.
You never really knew a man, he said, until you saw him die
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