Astonishing the Gods

Ben Okri

2 ideas

1. Invisible man voyages to invisible city

   A man realizes he is invisible when he finds that people like him are absent from every history book he reads. He sets out to find the secret of visibility and, after a sea voyage of years, lands on an island whose inhabitants are also invisible, but by choice and achievement. Guided through the city, he learns that the invisibility he fled as erasure is, for them, the mark of spiritual perfection.

2. Seeing requires unlearning, not more information

   The city's truths cannot be perceived by accumulating facts. The traveler's habitual ways of looking, which are shaped by fear, desire and ego, are what block his sight. His education works by stripping away assumptions, so that perception clears as the self becomes less insistent.

Save and mark ideas in the app