"So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all know… - Ralph Ellison

Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled “file and forget,” and I can neither file nor forget.

Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "File and forget."

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, everything and anything except me.

Perhaps simple to be known, to be looked upon by so many people, to be the focal point of so many concentrating eyes, perhaps this was enough to make one different; enough to transform one into something else, someone else; just as by becoming and increasingly larger boy one became one day a man.

If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance.