Quotes from Akiko Busch

The impulse to escape notice is not about complacent isolation or senseless conformity, but about maintaining identity, propriety, autonomy, and voice. It is not about retreating from the digital world but about finding some genuine alternative to a life of perpetual display.

Although it may be unused, the front door continues to appeal to our sense arrival. Call it the ceremony of coming home.

Inconspicuousness begins as self-protection but soon extends to self-reliance and a deeper appreciation of who we are and where we belong in things.

She suggests, too, that our capacity for intimate relationships can depend on having this deep core of private awareness; and that acknowledging our unknown and unseen selves, and offering these up only when and if we choose, is essential to our ability to engage in close relationships. Valuing interior experience is vital to developing a sense of self, and how we reveal ourselves to the outside world has everything to do with how we stay out of view when we need to.

In the poetry of arrival, the garage door is free verse; the front door can be anything from a rhyming couplet to a sonnet.

Yet though Americans have been driving up to their houses for decades and entering through backdoors, side doors, kitchen doors, and especially doors through garages, architects keep designing houses with ceremonial front doors that are nowhere near any car or driveway.

It has become routine to assume that the rewards of life are public and that our lives can be measured by how we are seen rather than what we do.

Submerged, I have become a refugee from the visible world.

The comparative isolation of any island can result in what Oliver Sacks calls geographic singularity, a kind of separateness that allows not only for the evolution of animal and plant species that can be found nowhere else, but also for systems of thinking and belief that develop with limited external influence and intrusions; islands cultivate what is unique on this earth.