Love Quote by George Wald

Wald cuts straight through modern vanity by framing it as a romance: we are not merely attentive to the body, we are infatuated with it. That verb matters. Love suggests devotion, sacrifice, and irrationality - exactly the emotional overinvestment he thinks we’ve redirected toward a physical shell. By pointing to "that thing that looks back at us from the mirror", he turns the body into an object and a stranger at once: familiar enough to fuss over, alien enough to keep interrogating, day after day, for reassurance.

The subtext is almost clinical: identity has been outsourced to surfaces. "Repository" is a scientist’s word, cool and impersonal, and it punctures the warm glow of "lovely identity". He’s implying that what we call the self has been stored in the most measurable place possible - flesh - because flesh can be monitored, improved, disciplined, and displayed. That’s why the chase never ends. If identity is lodged in the body, then time becomes an enemy and maintenance becomes a moral project.

Contextually, Wald lived through a century that made bodies newly legible and newly marketable: the rise of advertising, mass media, fitness culture, and biomedical authority. As a scientist (and a vision researcher), he’s attuned to how seeing structures belief. The mirror isn’t just glass; it’s a technology of self-surveillance. Wald’s sting is that the mirror promises certainty ("there I am") while quietly manufacturing insecurity: you keep chasing the person you hope the body can prove you are.