Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen

In this sense the self is always immaterial and unseen; but we learn to accept that it is shackled to visible flesh and blood

In the closed logic of the folktale, magic is normal: people use it, sometimes they suffer for it or are fooled by it, but they are never very surprised by it.

for children, the act of seeing a person – which is to say, of knowing about the person’s presence – depends on a mutuality of gaze: the child believes that only when an observer locks eyes with her can he register her actuality.

This is a disconcerting, almost dizzying thought: we’re left thinking not how a child can be so foolish as to imagine that they vanish by hiding their eyes, but rather, how extraordinary it is that the self is not located from birth in the physical body –

magic is not so much a technical skill as a mode of thinking

Magic is not a procedure that produces effects, but a symbolic system with a social function

In the gap between what we hoped for and what we got is a glimpse of who we are.

If we follow Eliphas Lévi by placing invisibility in the mind, we make it subject to the dictates of the will. The power of invisibility is then a question of who commands that will

What was previously a series of directed streams was now a disembodied ocean as vast as the cosmos. And whereas this invisible sea had seemed to Maxwell to be filled with the presence of God, by the fin de siècle it had come to seem more like a wasteland