The human situation (Bronk)

The human situation seems less a come-as-you-are party than a party to which we are bidden to come as our favorite character and, though we are sometimes cheap or shy, we do fairly well. We put on the costurme and badges, the mental attitudes, the facial and vocal expressions of something, of someone. Such an action gives shape and clarity to our desires, gives them poles and simplicity; it sets us up as some sort of marked-off existent. It is of course evasive. It is hard to face how insanely evasive until we have watched the fatal despair with which we fight off the loss of an assumed identity. An assumed identity is made from appearances and lets us be nothing and yet appear to be something. We don't so much want to be something as we want to be allowed to look like something, to be granted general recognition--even acclaim--as what we pretend to be, to win the prize for Best Costume.

William Bronk, from "Copan: Unwillingness, The Unwilled"