The passage you shared is beautiful, but it's not quite registering how the essay evoked it for you. Can you say more?
Btw - thanks for the flag on the SSL error. Fixed the URL and it should be properly pointing to http://www.teawithstrangers.com now
One thing I take away from the excerpt is that the person we present and feel ourselves as during interactions with others is not exactly the same as the person we are alone. There isn't necessarily an element of deceit to this. Instead, we should pay attention to both selves -- and to me much of your essay is about paying attention to the person we are when we're alone, and being aware of differences between the two selves, without necessarily needing to reconcile them.
I think I would say we project different aspects of ourselves into lower dimensions (thoughts and words) depending on the transformation function (context into which we are projecting ourselves).
You get a twofer of analogies today!
Such a great way to articulate this. This is why I love HN.
FWIW, I enjoyed the essay.
I think I hit on the point in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23596448
I aimed to make this essay as easy to digest as possible, and part of that effort involved eliminating labels, ideas or phrases that might have a lot of inconsistent associations across different readers' minds (e.g. "mindfulness")
> And yet one did not find in Bergotte’s speech a certain luminosity which in his books, as in those of some other writers, often modified in the written sentence the appearance of its words. This was doubtless because the light issues from so profound a depth that its rays do not penetrate to our spoken words in the hours in which, thrown open to others by the act of conversation, we are to a certain extent closed to ourselves.
(Also, I'm getting some SSL error from the "Tea With Strangers" website.)