masks

His face was neither handsome nor anything else. It just was.

How beautiful the tragic seems when it is beneath a mask, but when it appears so nakedly before me and... when I am so forcibly implicated... I don't know whether I care for it so much. Somehow or other it is as though I were torturing myself.("Thirty-Three Abominations")

There__ no such thing as a good or bad person: there are just people who have each been or seem to have been good or bad to you, someone, or some people, thus far.

Like icebergs, people normally expose only a small part of themselves, and generally just the part they wish to show.

Only by concealing our identities can we shed the masks we have to wear at school, at work, even at home - everywhere there is surveillance, policing, punishment - masks that are increasingly indistinguishable from ourselves.

What I wear on and off stage is my mask. You see, a mask doesn't hide you, it exposes you.

The sun tried to shine through the clouds but its light was dimmed even in us; high noon approached. I looked outside through the tinted windows at the people promenading down Madison. Couples held hands, bankers squeezed through crowds of window shoppers late for their daily thieving but all of them, even the poor, seemed content with existence, some even seemed happy. Nearly everyone__ outer shell was delicate and gracious that at the end of it all, on the border of nonexistence, each and everyone was happy to be alive. Everyone carried their heads with a radiance past the space they occupied and glided through time like flamenco dancers in a studio as big as the planet. Everyone wore masks that hid their sorrow (either that or they were sincerely happy) or wore armor that lightened the burden on their shoulders. Worst of all, I could not detect ever a flicker of thought; brains mired behind viral images and videos of people making even greater fools of themselves than they already were. And as the greatest fool of them all, I walked among them, never having learned to don the mask of happiness.

If you could choose any mask to wear right now, what would it be?_ Anne lay down her yarn. __ suppose if, as you say, I would grow into this mask, then I would make it of my own face ._._. but a braver, better version of myself._ __nd what would this braver Anne do?_ The answer came quickly, as if it had been there all along. I__ save them, she thought.

People seldom change. Only their masks do. It is only our perception of them and the perception they have of themselves that actually change.

Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.

People with depression can't just snap out of it or "turn that frown upside down." Depression can be a painful and overwhelming state that makes one unable to function, to think clearly or reasonably, or to want to simply face another day. Many people suffer alone and in silence because they are scared or ashamed. They feel weak_or pitiful. How can a person be incapable of having joy? __hy can__ I just have a good time? Why can__ I get on with it?

There are a great number of ego defenses, and the combinations and circumstances in which we use them reflect on our personality. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum of its ego defenses, which are constantly shaping, upholding, protecting, and repairing it.The self is like a cracked mask that is in constant need of being pieced together. But behind the mask there is nobody at home.

The mask's back in place. The heard-it-all smile. The seen-it-all eyes.

In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride__r superbia, in Augustine's Latin formulation__akes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to do is assert how well things are going for us, just as friendship has a chance to grow only when we fare to share what we are afraid of and regret. The rest is merely showmanship. The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert__ll of these emerge as simply part of the human condition.

We tried to make a heaven of earth,But the earth is just a stage, a school,Where we wear our masks and play our rolesAnd teach each other how to love.

Everybody put on masks, including you and me. We all wear masks.

People do not change. It is just that they change the masks they wear and the acts they put on, with new costumes, new dialogues and new settings.That is human nature.

Artists hide their identities in the brushstrokes of their paintings, the verses in their cantos, and the sentences in their novels. The true face of an artist is never on his face and this is what he prefers. Others misunderstand this displaced melancholy with an absence of melancholy.