Читать книгу The Inventors - Peter Selgin - Страница 24

WE DON’T SEE OURSELVES AS WE ARE BUT AS WE WERE or wish to be or as we fear becoming. The image in the mirror is a distortion – an amalgam of dreams, nightmares, nostalgia, fantasies, ideals, worries, and assumptions. Even photographs aren’t objective, since they offer only the thinnest slice of a moment in time, one assailed by shadows or harsh light, fleeting expressions and moods, colored in all sorts of ways first by the camera, then by the viewer – “a subjective and mood-filtered eye.”

There is no objectivity; or there is, but it’s an illusion.

I can’t tell you who I am, only who I think I am.

* * *

IN A DRAWER OF THE FILING CABINET IN MY LOFT there’s a cardboard portfolio jammed with photographs. One shows my twin brother and me walking on a trail through the woods at Huntington State Park, in Redding, Connecticut. The trail is strewn with yellow leaves. The photo was probably taken the year our father died, around Thanksgiving.

I’m wearing a brown plaid flannel shirt with the tails untucked over blue jeans; George wears a green linen shirt and white chinos. He walks a few yards ahead of me, arms flung out, head lowered. He’s laughing – at something I’ve said or one of his own jokes. I look more serious, my eyes downcast, my mouth parted in speech, uttering – or having just uttered – the witticism at which my brother laughs, or a repartee to his witticism. Making each other laugh was something George and I did a lot. Even when not in the same room or even in the same part of the world, we could make each other laugh. We’d wake up laughing at something the other said in a dream. It happens to this day.

In the snapshot George has a few pounds on me. He always did. He was always bigger, more robust. From the beginning, through the birth canal, George took the lead, born two minutes earlier, my older brother.

United States Patent # 3,518,441.“OPTICAL GAUGE FOR MEASURING THE THICKNESS OF A CONTINUOUS WEB,” Filed January 24, 1968.