You
are in your 60s, even 50s, and you are walking by a shop window, or in some
area in which a security monitor shows a scan of the line you are in. You sneak
a look. You see someone in the space where you should be but you do not
recognize the interloper. Then, after an unseemly lag of a second or two you
are forced to remake you own acquaintance; it seems you no longer know yourself
at first sight. The you behind your eyes believes you look like you did twenty
years ago, and it assumes that dated image is the real you, even if recent
photos tell a horror story. But photos seldom confirmed your self-image, even
when you were young, so you can dismiss the latest batch. In high school you
accepted only one or two out of the fifty on the contact sheet as satisfactory,
though none of your friends or family, when asked, could distinguish the person
in the photos you thought reasonably flattering from the many in which you
looked like a total doofus. To them they were all indistinguishably you they
were not even putting you on, as you vainly believed, when they thought the
best picture was one you felt the most loathsome.
Quotation from: Losing
It: in which an aging professor laments his shrinking brain, which he flatters
himself formerly did him Noble Service. By William Ian Miller. Yale University Press. 2011
