“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted
Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie extoplasms. 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.”
–from “Prologue” Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison–
