"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are"
About this Quote
Nin’s line is a neat little demolition charge planted under the idea of objective reality. It doesn’t just argue that people have “biases”; it suggests perception is an autobiography in disguise. The sentence turns on a simple inversion - not “things as they are,” but “things as we are” - a grammatical mirror that enacts the point: the world reflects back whatever psychic furniture we’ve hauled into the room.
The intent is both intimate and slightly accusatory. Nin, writing from a life steeped in diaries, psychoanalysis, and the performance of self, treats “seeing” as an act of projection. The subtext is that our certainty is often just unexamined selfhood wearing a trench coat. If you’re outraged, enamored, bored, threatened, it’s not only the scene doing that to you; it’s your history, your desires, your defenses selecting and coloring the data. The quote flatters no one with neutrality. It implies that moral panic, romantic idealization, even “common sense” are less like cameras and more like mood lighting.
Context matters: Nin’s era was wrestling with modernism’s suspicion of stable truths and Freud’s insistence that the unconscious runs the show. Her work lives in that overlap, where interior life becomes the real plot. Read now, the line feels eerily tailored to the algorithmic age: everyone inhabits a customized reality and calls it “just what I’m seeing.” Nin’s warning is elegant because it’s portable. It doesn’t demand you distrust the world; it demands you audit the self doing the looking.
The intent is both intimate and slightly accusatory. Nin, writing from a life steeped in diaries, psychoanalysis, and the performance of self, treats “seeing” as an act of projection. The subtext is that our certainty is often just unexamined selfhood wearing a trench coat. If you’re outraged, enamored, bored, threatened, it’s not only the scene doing that to you; it’s your history, your desires, your defenses selecting and coloring the data. The quote flatters no one with neutrality. It implies that moral panic, romantic idealization, even “common sense” are less like cameras and more like mood lighting.
Context matters: Nin’s era was wrestling with modernism’s suspicion of stable truths and Freud’s insistence that the unconscious runs the show. Her work lives in that overlap, where interior life becomes the real plot. Read now, the line feels eerily tailored to the algorithmic age: everyone inhabits a customized reality and calls it “just what I’m seeing.” Nin’s warning is elegant because it’s portable. It doesn’t demand you distrust the world; it demands you audit the self doing the looking.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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