All of us are abstractions, cast in an impermeable mixture of sand and cement of our own making.
We’re parodies of ourselves, fabricated partly out of pieces of the way we look in the mirror and partly from scraps of others’ perceptions of who we are. We construct images from oddments and orts, fashion a glue from wishes and tears and memories, and then, finally, we step gingerly into the mold that fits the form we built and allow ourselves to harden.
How odd that our abstractions become concrete-hard. Isn’t abstract the opposite of concrete? Or is an abstraction a distortion of reality?
Looking inward, we see the definitions depend on who’s doing the looking.
