Akiko Busch > Quotes

“The impulse to escape notice is not about complacent isolation or senseless conformity, but about maintaining identity, propriety, autonomy, and voice. It is not about retreating from the digital world but about finding some genuine alternative to a life of perpetual display.”
― Akiko Busch, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency

“Although it may be unused, the front door continues to appeal to our sense arrival. Call it the ceremony of coming home.”
― Akiko Busch, Geography of Home

“When identity is derived from projecting an image in the public realm, something is lost, some core of identity diluted, some sense of authority or interiority sacrificed. It is time to question the false equivalency between not being seen and hiding. And time to reevaluate the merits of the inconspicuous life, to search out some antidote to continuous exposure, and to reconsider the value of going unseen, undetected, or overlooked in this new world. Might invisibility be regarded not simply as refuge, but as a condition with its own meaning and power? Going unseen may be becoming a sign of decency and self-assurance. The impulse to escape notice is not about complacent isolation or senseless conformity, but about maintaining identity, propriety, autonomy, and voice. It is not about retreating from the digital world but about finding some genuine alternative to a life of perpetual display. It is not about mindless effacement but mindful awareness. Neither disgraceful nor discrediting, such obscurity can be vital to our very sense of being, a way of fitting in with the immediate social, cultural, or environmental landscape. Human endeavor can be something interior, private, and self-contained. We can gain, rather than suffer, from deep reserve.”
― Akiko Busch, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency

“Inconspicuousness begins as self-protection but soon extends to self-reliance and a deeper appreciation of who we are and where we belong in things.”
― Akiko Busch, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency

“She suggests, too, that our capacity for intimate relationships can depend on having this deep core of private awareness; and that acknowledging our unknown and unseen selves, and offering these up only when and if we choose, is essential to our ability to engage in close relationships. Valuing interior experience is vital to developing a sense of self, and how we reveal ourselves to the outside world has everything to do with how we stay out of view when we need to.”
― Akiko Busch, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency

“In the poetry of arrival, the garage door is free verse; the front door can be anything from a rhyming couplet to a sonnet.”
― Akiko Busch

“Yet though Americans have been driving up to their houses for decades and entering through backdoors, side doors, kitchen doors, and especially doors through garages, architects keep designing houses with ceremonial front doors that are nowhere near any car or driveway.”
― Akiko Busch, Geography of Home

“It has become routine to assume that the rewards of life are public and that our lives can be measured by how we are seen rather than what we do.”
― Akiko Busch, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency

“Submerged, I have become a refugee from the visible world.”
― Akiko Busch, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency

“Sometimes the most we can know about something lies in the possibility that we can never comprehend it.”
― Akiko Busch, Everything Else is Bric-a-Brac: Notes on Home

“The comparative isolation of any island can result in what Oliver Sacks calls geographic singularity, a kind of separateness that allows not only for the evolution of animal and plant species that can be found nowhere else, but also for systems of thinking and belief that develop with limited external influence and intrusions; islands cultivate what is unique on this earth.”
― Akiko Busch, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency