The Value of Going Unseen

In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 film, The Lady Vanishes, a young woman on a train becomes disturbed by the sudden disappearance of a kindly older woman, a governess and music teacher. The latter, a spinster, is introduced to the viewer when she writes the letters of her name in the condensation on one of the train’s glass windowpanes, only to have them evaporate almost instantly. Within minutes, she is gone, and the other passengers, steward, and conductor claim to have never seen her. Asked to describe her, the young woman can only say she was “middle-aged and ordinary,” before admitting, “I can’t remember.” Later in the film, the older woman is reduced to “a hallucination, a subjective image, a character in a novel subconsciously remembered,” and even “nothing but lumps of raw flesh,” all before she is revealed as a British spy, the movie’s ultimate heroine in the final scene.

Today, women appear—or disappear—in any manner of guises. In the photographer Patty Carroll’s series Anonymous Women, it is household artifacts and traditions—upholstery fabric, curtains, telephones, slabs of bacon, leaves of lettuce, a braided loaf of bread, rolls of wallpaper, pillows, and plates—into which each model disappears, swallowed whole by the python of domesticity. In Whitney Otto’s novel Now You See Her, the vanishing woman works in an office, present but unseen. Her cat is indifferent when she trips over it, and when she presses her palm to her forehead, it is “only to notice her hand fading away with the motion, from fingertips to forearm.” In the more recent film Hello, My Name Is Doris, Sally Field plays an older woman who develops a crush on a younger man with whom she shares an office; at the beginning of the story, he adjusts her crooked glasses. As the film critic Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times, the young man’s spontaneous gesture of kindness is transformative: Wrinkles, apparently, “have a way of making women disappear one crease at a time,” and when she is noticed momentarily by a younger man, such recognition evidently “makes her visible, most importantly to herself.”

The invisible woman might be the actor no longer offered roles after her 40th birthday, the 50-year-old woman who can’t land a job interview, or the widow who finds her dinner invitations declining with the absence of her husband. She is the woman who finds that she is no longer the object of the male gaze—youth faded, childbearing years behind her, social value diminished. Referring to her anticipated disappearance on her upcoming 50th birthday, the writer Ayelet Waldman said to an interviewer, “I have a big personality, and I have a certain level of professional competence, and I’m used to being taken seriously professionally. And suddenly, it’s like I just vanished from the room. And I have to yell so much louder to be seen. … I just want to walk down the street and have someone notice that I exist.”

Her words evoke another woman walking, unseen, down the street nearly a century ago. As Clarissa Dalloway shops in London for flowers on a June morning, Virginia Woolf speculates about her protagonist’s transitory identity. Mrs. Dalloway, considering her place among the people she knows, finds that “often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown.” She recalls that she is known now simply by her husband’s name, and a few sentences later, she considers how sometimes it is simply by their gloves and shoes that women are identified. She knows nothing, she thinks, no language, no history, and hardly reads books except memoirs. She realizes then that “her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct.”

One’s identity, Woolf seems to say, is transient, and perhaps all the more so with age. As women become older, they entertain a wider set of choices about when and how they are seen. This vanishing can occur more rapidly or be felt more acutely. Clarissa Dalloway’s sense of fleeting self was described more explicitly decades later by the writer Francine du Plessix Gray in her essay “The Third Age.” If the gaze of others wanes, Gray suggests, one might choose to “acquire instead a deepened inward gaze, or intensify our observation of others, or evolve alternative means of attention-getting which transcend sexuality and depend, as the mentors of my youth taught me, upon presence, authority, and voice.”

Gray may be talking about the difference between being a subject and an object. It is a cliché to point out that ours is a culture in which men routinely objectify women, but according to Alison Carper, a psychologist who practices in New York, if a woman is complicit in this practice—that is, in viewing herself as an object—she cannot help but be acutely aware when that object loses its desirability. “As humans, we all need to be recognized,” Carper adds, “but as we grow older, the manner of recognition we search for can change. A subject is someone who experiences her own agency, who is aware of how she can and does have an impact on others and how she is, ultimately, the author of her own life. She is aware of the responsibility this carries.” A woman without fully developed interiority might continue to objectify herself.

Clarissa Dalloway is clearly a subject. She realizes that her body is simply something that she wears, and then, a sentence later, finds that it is really nothing, nothing at all. Woolf suggests a correlation between invisibility and the ability to know people by instinct when she identifies both these qualities in Clarissa within a single paragraph. Since she published Mrs. Dalloway in the mid-1920s, more prosaic studies of human nature have come to similar conclusions. A reduced sense of visibility does not necessarily constrain experience. Associated with greater empathy and compassion, invisibility directs us toward a more humanitarian view of the larger world. This diminished status can, in fact, sustain and inform—rather than limit—our lives. Going unrecognized can, paradoxically, help us recognize our place in the larger scheme of things.

It is a theme Woolf returns to again and again, as when Clarissa Dalloway considers the “odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter—even trees, or barns.” Clarissa recognizes that our lives can be measured by what we have done to touch the lives of others; she is attuned to how human associations can be formed with complete strangers. And to the enduring value—indeed, power—of such alliances.

Her modern counterpart might be Mystique, the shape-shifting mutant from the X-Men series, played most recently by Jennifer Lawrence. She has no physical self beyond her blue body and instead morphs into the forms of others, among them an assassin, a German secret agent, a professor, a young girl, a senator’s wife, a fashion model, and a member of the U.S. Department of Defense. Her power is her indistinct appearance; it is what enables her to assume other identities.

But another likely counterpart to Clarissa Dalloway might be the famous 1960s model Vera Lehndorff, popularly known then as Veruschka. Toward the conclusion of her career, she collaborated with the German artist Holger Trülzsch, painting her body in patterns, colors, and textures to match different backgrounds. “When I started to paint myself,” Lehndorff writes,

“the color and I were one: there was no “between.” … This experience of coherence between us and the world around us is one of well-being; it produces a sense of affinity with whatever it is with which we come into contact.”

There is Lehndorff, lying on gray sand or receding into a dark doorway or leaning against a white wall. In the last, her body has been stippled white up to her shoulders, but her head seems to have been dyed a bright azure to match the sky behind it. It is an image of the female body going from object to air, from material to immaterial, from thing to nothing. It is camouflage that has nothing to do with escaping prey, avoiding danger, or finding food or a mate, and everything to do with finding a coherence.

All this may speak to a revised etiquette of invisibility. Opacity itself can work as a connective tissue. If humans do leave a mark, it is just some quick and temporary elusive imprint, nothing more than a fugitive logo or insignia. And it’s probably not the worst thing for any of us to imagine identity as an arrangement of letters written for a few moments on the clouded window of a train that is speeding out of view.

This article has been adapted from Akiko Busch’s book, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency.

The Invisibility of Older Women. By Akiko Busch. The Atlantic,  February 27, 2019. 

Akiko Busch’s latest book is How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency, from which this essay is adapted.

A yellow tang is loitering to my left. A school of iridescent purple reef fish shines into view. A royal-blue queen angelfish glides out of sight. Despite our proximity, I am beyond the notice of a massive southern stingray sweeping along the seafloor, the drape of its thin pectoral fins following and folding over the ripples of the sand bed. The striped parrotfish are oblivious to me, while the yellowtail damselfish and flurry of silversides couldn’t be less inter­ested. The school of tiny iridescent purple gobies flutters past with utter detachment.

We all know that sensation of life slowing down, of being suspended in time, of being outside the rhythm of ordinary life, but underwater, that is the way things really are. We may all be occupying the same turquoise chamber, but the sense of remove is vast; my amphibian self is alert to both the immeasurable dis­tance from and profound connection to the water world around me. Submerged, I have become a refugee from the visible world.

It’s an excursion that has value at a time when the twin circumstances of the surveillance economy and social media have made visibility our common currency. In the process, these have changed the way we see ourselves, often allowing us to believe that our lives can be measured by how we are seen rather than by what we do. But when identity is derived from projecting an image in the public realm, something is lost, some core of identity diminished, some sense of authority and interiority sacrificed. And it occurs to me that it is time to re-evaluate the merits of the inconspicuous life, to search out some antidote to continuous exposure, to reconsider the value of going unseen and overlooked.

Which is why I have signed up for this tutorial in disappearance 40 feet beneath the surface of the deep blue Caribbean Sea. It is a place where we carry ourselves differently. We are there and not. It is not just the shift in gravitational pull, but that the fluid environment is intrinsically more familiar to us. If the composition of our own beings is 60-per-cent liquid, it only makes sense that it is easy to be absorbed, or at least feel ab­sorbed, by the surrounding waters. We recognize the particles in which we are submerged, as though the blood in our own veins has found it possible to flow in congruence with the currents streaming around us. It is not quite a molecular kinship, but close. Underwater, we have a different relationship with our surroundings.

Water magnifies and distorts our perceptions. We are unable to smell. We are unable to speak, and that stills us in some essential way. The human voice is absent, replaced by the sound of breathing, a gentle repetition that induces a further calm. Other sounds are more muffled. Our ears are designed to function in air, and underwater, it is diffi­cult for us to recognize the direction from which sound is com­ing or to untangle its vibrations. We can hear, but not very well.

Yet, the sense of touch comes alive. The water temperature is in the high 70s, and different sets of skin receptors allow me to read its gentle coolness, its motion, texture, vibration and pressure. Touch is said to be 10 times stronger than verbal or emotional contact, and when I move, it is gradual, leisurely, multidirectional, as though my body has dematerialized in some intrinsic way, conforming to the currents as best it can. The aquatic world offers invisibility that is less about being unseen and more about a dilution of self and the sensation of assimila­tion and adaptation. As odd as it seems, I might even say that being underwater confers a sense of solidarity.

The mammalian dive reflex transforms one’s sense of being. When the body is submerged, the hu­man heart rate slows anywhere from 10 to 20 per cent. Blood circulation slows as well, redirecting flow to the vital organs. With heartbeat and circulation reset, our nervous systems are also recalibrated, and the sense of physical suspension has a psy­chic corollary. It is why people speak of feeling tranquil, meditative when they are in deep water. It is why human beings in a condition of emotional upset or trauma are sometimes advised to immerse their faces in a bowl of cold water. And why free divers who go into water up to 200 metres for minutes at a time on a single breath speak of feeling serene; without the rhythm of breathing, their sense of time is even further diminished.

That sense of languor extends to one’s thoughts and impres­sions. Observations come and go unhurried. A plume of anem­one waves quietly in the current. A three-foot webbed lavender sea fan flutters almost imperceptibly. A turquoise parrotfish drifts by me. An army of small fairy basslets, violet with brilliant yellow tails, streams beneath me. But each of these organisms has a strategy. The yellow trumpet fish shifts vertically to assume the structure of the stalks of coral sur­rounding it; or it may align itself with a larger fish shadowing its feeding spot. The rosy hues of the channel crab echo the bejewelled pink patches of crustose algae on which it rests. The delicate brown rosettes on the skin of a flounder are nearly indistinguishable from the pebbly surface of the seafloor.

The ballet of marine biota is full of purpose, function and reason, as well as predation, consumption, reproduction and all the familiar activities of everyday life. The speckled patterning of the moray eel is in sync with the colour and texture of the encrusted coral crevices it inhabits. The multicoloured mottled surface of a scorpion fish is indistinguishable from the algae in which it has taken up residence. The dots on the spotted butterfly fish are directional decoys, existing to confuse predators as to where, exactly, their eyes are. Parrotfish secrete a membrane of mucus at night to conceal their odour from nocturnal predators. The blue tang floating to my left is looking for algae to feed on; the spotted butterfly fish is foraging for tiny invertebrates; the threads of fire coral will sting me if I happen to brush up against them; and the yellow-bearded fireworm resting on the floor of the reef is equipped with bristles that will inject me with a painful toxin if I happen to touch it. For all their gaudy displays, each of these is a master of the inconspicuous. Invisibility in the aquatic realm is ordinary, powerful and above all, essential to survival.

Not long afterward, I encounter an immense hawksbill sea turtle scuttling along the sand, grazing on the algae and seagrass in its path, its three-foot carapace and mas­sive spotted legs advancing with an elephantine poise. It makes sense that we take such plea­sure in the state of weightlessness. A friend of mine who is a diver speaks of the way she loses herself in increments when submerged, and this little deficit of self suddenly seems key. Perhaps it comes not just from the sensory novelty, that thrill of zero gravity, but from some sensation of having a spirit self, some innate knowledge that it can be a good thing to lose the materiality of everyday life.

The aquatic world is as surreal as anything imagined by Sal­vador Dali. But the invisible man he painted in 1929, with golden hair made of clouds, legs fashioned by waterfalls, and a torso constructed of architectural ruins, was painted during what the artist called his paranoia phase, and reflects a horror of being consumed by one’s surroundings. The artist’s sense of identity was under siege, dissolving, on the verge of being de­voured by his environment. It is too bad Dali never made any diving trips in a tropical sea. Or knew anything about the mammalian dive reflex.

Perhaps he would have been more receptive to finding accommodation by the world around him. What would he have made of a basket star that wraps itself in strands of coral? Or a star-shaped sponge? Or one that looks like an orange elephant ear? Or others in the shape of balls and barrels, tubes, vases, ropes? Or worms that present themselves as silvery feather dusters? Or coral that comes in the shape of pencils, leaves, lettuce, knobs, corkscrews, antlers, fingers, candelabra, wires and strings, dinner plates and doorknobs, cacti and cups, brains and buttons, feathers and fans? Would he have persisted in his paranoia? If he had observed such a carnival 40 feet beneath the surface, his invisiphobia might likely have become invisiphilia.

This is not about vanishing so much as some vital rearrange­ment of weight, substance and space. It is possible for us to associate the limit­lessness of the vast blue abyss with freedom. We are affiliated with our surroundings, experiencing inclusion and placement in a wider world. It is not only our sense of space that is under revision here, but also our humanity. The overview effect is the term used in space ex­ploration to define that cognitive shift that astronauts experi­ence when they see the Earth from outer space. Viewing the blue marble from orbit, they re-evaluate life on earth, reconsid­ering the significance of regional and national boundaries and our status within them, inevitably reassessing the importance we give ourselves; not surprisingly, when photographs of the Earth as viewed from outer space were first taken in the late 1940s, they signalled a shift in human consciousness.

Immersion in the deep sea seems to offer some corollary, an underview ef­fect perhaps. Although it is a view from beneath rather than from above, from water rather than from space, and an experi­ence of absorption and connection rather than of distance and detachment, it, too, enables us to recalibrate our place in things.

That re-evaluation may be relevant now more than ever. Not because we necessarily should be more discreet, unobtrusive, inconspicuous – though all of these would likely do us good – but because the Earth is warming. There will be nine billion of us soon. We will have no choice but to reassess our place in things. And part of this may have to do with how we reconsider our identity; how we imagine some reduction in scale; how we consider a different way of being in this world; and how we learn to become constituents in a broader landscape. Our deeply held values about individuality may even become passé. We are, each one of us, less important than we think.

A yellowtail snapper drifts past. A blue parrotfish skims by beneath me. My presence means nothing to them.

The value of going unseen. By Akiko Busch. The Globe and Mail, March 1, 2019.

In our increasingly networked and image-saturated lives, the notion of disappearing has never been both more enchanting. A lifelong student and observer of the natural world, Akiko Busch, set out to explore her own uneasiness with this arrangement. Her new book, “How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency.”

Joe Donahue talks on The Book Show with Akiko Busch.   WAMC,  March 4, 2019. 

Caroline Donahue talks with Akiko Busch on  How to Disappear.

Akiko Busch wanted to look at how invisibility could be a superpower.   These days, so much of our time is spent worrying about how to be more visible as writers. Do we have enough presence on social media? Will a publisher accept our book if we send it to them, or will enough readers find our books if we publish them ourselves? In the midst of this intense quest for visibility and transparency in a world that is increasingly connected, Akiko Busch sought to look at how invisibility is a power as well when it is employed by choice.   In her beautiful book, she explores examples of invisibility in nature, her own home, and family, and as far away as Iceland, where their legends include invisible people who live alongside the visible ones, and who are just a bit better than the rest of us. This book opens us up to the magic of not being seen when we want to hide, and was a total sigh of relief to read and discuss since we writers love to be hermits, don't we?

The Secret Library Podcast,  April 4, 2019.

Akiko Busch is a writer and a swimmer. She teaches environmental writing at Bennington College and seems to live as off the grid as one can in 2019. Much of her writing feels drawn from understated encounters with nature and the pastoral sublime, such as observing water eels in a brook or chopping vegetables in a Hudson Valley home. Her 2009 book The Uncommon Life of Common Objects has an entire chapter devoted to vegetable-peelers. So when her new essay collection, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency, touches on things like Barbie dolls that can connect to WiFi and smart refrigerators, the reader begins to worry that no one, not even Aniko Busch, can order a new vegetable-peeler online without worrying who’s tracking her and why.

In How to Disappear, Busch contemplates how government surveillance, smart technology, and our own desire to be seen have all contributed to a perhaps irrevocable loss of personal privacy. She does this circuitously, eschewing the alarmist and Luddite tropes that encumber many studies of our technology-dependent culture. Instead, Busch meanders across a broad cultural landscape to locate the source of our beliefs, fears, and desires about invisibility. She looks at the role of invisibility in children’s stories (from imaginary friends to Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak) and the Huldufólk, the invisible people who are thought to live inside Iceland’s lava rocks. She visits a physics lab at the University of Rochester where scientists study “transformation optics,” the practice of bending light waves around things to render them invisible. Another essay reconsiders Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway to think through aging, and the invisibility of older women. Busch explores camouflage, anonymity and unsigned works of art, and police surveillance of minorities. By drawing from natural science, children’s literature, folklore, art history, and more, Busch takes the timely issue of privacy and makes it timeless.

Whenever I’m at a party and people ask me to say something in Russian, my go-to is У меня есть право иметь секреты—“I have the right to have secrets.” It both satisfies the desire people have to hear their stereotypes about Russia confirmed and makes it sound like I lead an interesting life. I was reminded of that sentence when I read Busch’s exploration of the French term jardin secret, “secret garden,” a catchall phrase that can refer to any private passion that provides what Busch calls “a psychic cloister” from the demands of the outside world. “Implicit in the jardin secret,” she writes “is that small personal histories need not always be shared; that human experience and imagination are sometimes a matter of private intentions, actions, or rewards.” While Busch insists a jardin secret can include such innocent pleasures as “a private collection of feathers, stones, books, or fans,” I couldn’t help but feel like they must be sensuous things, these secret gardens, pleasures more guilty than innocent. I certainly feel that way about my imaginary Russian secrets.

Why do we so often believe that secrecy must necessarily mask transgression? Busch unravels that association in How to Disappear. The laborious, sometimes caustic recipes for invisibility ink and potion included in the book (some from mythology, some from military history) themselves suggest something nefarious. Take for instance the hulinhjalmur, an invisibility-granting symbol from ancient Iceland that had to be smeared on a person’s forehead with a mixture of “blood drawn from your finger and nipples, mixed with the blood and brains of a raven along with a piece of human stomach.” Busch writes that our tendency “to associate [invisibility] with wrongdoing, degeneracy, malice, even the work of the devil” is not accidental. It is inscribed into many of our oldest myths, including the Ring of Gyges, retold famously by Kristin Scott Thomas’s character in The English Patient. Gyges, a simple shepherd who discovers a ring that confers invisibility, uses his newfound power to kill the king, marry his wife, and take the throne for himself. This idea, that invisibility can lead  “an otherwise ordinary and honorable person to commit transgressions and behave unjustly,” has stubbornly stayed with us.

Ironically, we engage most wholeheartedly in invisibility when we are supposedly at our most innocent, as children. In the opening chapter, Busch recounts a story of her two-year-old son throwing his grandmother’s gold earrings out of the window. “Appropriate reprimands were made,” she assures, “but I was curious: was this some experimentation with gravity?… Did I have a thief on my hands?” Busch ultimately concludes that her son was simply marveling at something child psychologists refer to as “object permanence,” the idea that “objects and people can continue to exist even though they may not be seen.” Tracing the importance of invisibility in children’s literature, particularly the “capes, raps, rings, shields, potions” that confer the power to make a child protagonist go unseen, Busch reminds us that “learning to manage disappearance is intrinsic to childhood play.”

In essence, Busch argues that growing up is part and parcel with the independence groomed through secret adventures, hideaways in the forest or on urban rooftops, and imaginary confidants that adults can’t see. Reading How to Disappear, I wondered if we aren’t, as a society, continuously in the process of learning object permanence. If we really believe that things continue to exist when they’re not visible, then why must they always be geotagged, photographed, shared, аnd optimally filtered?

One of the most powerful aspects of How to Disappear is Busch’s exploration of the ways that artists experiment with invisibility, erasure, and vanishing as sites of creative force and even political resistance. There is Irina Ratushinskaya, the Soviet dissident writer who, while imprisoned in a labor camp, wrote poems on bars of soap using the end of a matchstick. She washed the verses off after she committed them to memory. In recounting Ratushinskaya’s story, Busch disentangles the erasure of art from the legacy of censorship, mounting a case for invisibility as protest. She writes about Jonathan Safran Foer’s die-cut panegyric to Bruno Schulz, Tree of Codes, a book composed entirely of cutouts from the Polish author’s short-story collection, The Street of Crocodiles. I wondered why she didn’t mention the work of Alexandra Bell, whose Counternarratives series, made up of redacted news articles, uses strategic erasure to expose racial bias in media coverage. Bell’s 2017 piece, “A Teenager With Promise,” deletes all but those words from a New York Times headline about Michael Brown.

Visibility is, of course, a political issue. But Busch cautions us against thinking that our society’s most marginalized communities are necessarily invisible, as they are often thought to be; in many ways, she attests, they are hypervisible and surveilled, and I would add, tokenized, held up to the spotlight as signs of progress when practically none has been made. In teasing through this idea, I was reminded of the Martiniquan writer Édouard Glissant. Writing about the challenge postcolonial writers face in finding a global readership without losing local identity, Glissant famously declared, “We clamor for the right to opacity.” Rather than call for representation, Glissant believed in the political potency of inscrutability, of resisting attempts to dilute black art until it was comprehensible to white audiences. Opacity is a theory of concealment, not quite the same as invisibility. Glissant wanted to be seen, not looked through.

I think Busch’s interest in invisibility began, fittingly, with water eels. In her book The Last Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science, she observes a glass eel in a stream; the aptly named animal is perfectly see-through. Its insides, including its heart and its dinner, can be seen with the naked eye if you look closely enough. Busch remarks, with amazement, that something could be transparent and still a complete mystery; it would seem to challenge our most basic assumptions about the relationship between being seen and being understood. “How is it possible,” she wonders, “to hold something so utterly small and transparent in the palm of your hand and still know so little about it?” Indeed, maybe what we are all searching for is a way to move through our new world like a glass eel, on full view and yet, somehow, still mysterious.

I have never been mysterious, sadly. And so, I have always been attracted to people who can manage duplicity, who can disappear into the night and never tell anyone where they went. A friend once stole my car keys and did just that—it’s one of the reasons I like him. Reading Busch, I often thought of the short story “The Lady with the Dog” by Anton Chekhov. The main character, Gurov, is having an affair with a woman he met on vacation in Yalta. Having returned home to Moscow, he finds himself living a double life. One life is “open, seen and known by all” and the other is carried out in secret. That secret life contains “everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life.” Perhaps there can be a sincerity to invisibility. Perhaps we can, like Gurov and the water eel, lead two lives, one visible and one just for us.

The Beauty of Invisibility. By Jennifer Wilson. The Paris Review, February 25, 2019.

Transcendentalist writers will tell you that a quiet walk through a forest can upend your universe. It happened recently to Akiko Busch, author of How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency, a survival manifesto for the social media age disguised as a collection of personal essays.

Observing creatures in the wetlands of Hudson Valley, New York, where she lives, Busch writes:

‘In the woods no more than an hour, I am struck anew by invisibility and its improvisational choreography, as a necessary condition of life. I am reminded of the grace of reticence, the power of discretion, and the possibility of being utterly private and autonomous yet deeply aware of and receptive to the world. If I am enchanted by staying out of sight, it is because such behavior seems so rare in our own species. In recent years, we have been more preoccupied than ever by the question of how to stay in view.”

In 11 chapters, Busch offers a litany of exit strategies—a field guide she calls it—from today’s hyper-connected world. She argues for the utility of “going dark” as a counterpoint to our neurosis with tracking, checking in, and geotagging. Maybe not broadcasting our every joy and disappointment can be refreshing, if not transformational, she suggests.

I observed this kind of restraint at a business lunch in Yoshino, Japan. With every course, my companions—mostly dads—whipped out their mobile phones and contorted their bodies to capture those all-too familiar overhead plate close-ups. In amusement, I commented that it was nice to see that Instagram foodie habits were alive and well in rural Japan. But the pictures were actually not for social media, they clarified. It turns out the snapshots of salmon spaghetti and red bean parfaits were for themselves—private mementos of a good meal and the good company that day.

Busch’s book isn’t kindling for neo-Luddites. She doesn’t hate the internet, despite what some critics suggest. A close reading of her lyrical prose reveals that she’s simply calling for balance. “It is not retreating from the digital world but about finding some genuine alternative to a life of perpetual display,” she explains.

In parts, How to Disappear can feel dense with one too many examples. Within a few pages, Busch flits from homespun recipes for invisible ink, her father’s redacted CIA file, a MoMA exhibit about dust, the invention of the Signal app, Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning, and an online ghost poetry experiment—invisibility is an elastic concept after all. Busch begins chapters with a charming personal anecdote that you wish she’d continue with rather than check off other examples. But perhaps her choice to not make the book so autobiographical is a demonstration of how an essayist writing in the first person can seize the privilege of being opaque—or partially invisible—to the reader.

In parts, How to Disappear can feel dense with one too many examples. Within a few pages, Busch flits from homespun recipes for invisible ink, her father’s redacted CIA file, a MoMA exhibit about dust, the invention of the Signal app, Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning, and an online ghost poetry experiment—invisibility is an elastic concept after all. Busch begins chapters with a charming personal anecdote that you wish she’d continue with rather than check off other examples. But perhaps her choice to not make the book so autobiographical is a demonstration of how an essayist writing in the first person can seize the privilege of being opaque—or partially invisible—to the reader.

In praise of invisibility in the age of ceaseless self-promotion. By Anne Quito. Quartzy , March 31, 2019

When I was learning to swim, a powerful yet diminutive athlete—my 5-foot mother—gave me a tip: “Everything that actually matters, John, happens beneath the surface.” At the time, I thought this was nonsense. I wanted to be seen. My splashing and thrashing were visible signs of my speed. My mother just shook her head: They were signs of something, but definitely not speed.

Akiko Busch’s “How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency” serves as a gentle reminder of the wisdom of this advice and a way to broaden the scope of the suggestion: Stop splashing and thrashing; stop confusing what is most obvious or distracting for what is genuinely important. Almost everything that actually matters in life happens beneath the surface. Ms. Busch, who has rightly been compared to Annie Dillard and Edward Abbey, has dedicated nearly 30 years to sounding this message, one that our age seems intent on ignoring.

Ms. Busch’s “Nine Ways to Cross a River” (2007), a graceful meditation on open-water swimming, explored the power of quiet solitude. The book, like most understated virtues, came and went largely without notice. Three years later, her “Patience: Taking Time in an Age of Acceleration” stood against the rushing flow of modern life and was summarily swept away. “How to Disappear” runs against modernity’s most basic urge—our desperate desire to be seen—and therefore risks a similar fate. But it is precisely Ms. Busch’s subtle contrarianism that deserves our sustained attention.

Her intent is to “compile a field guide to invisibility,” but she rightly acknowledges the concept’s potential shortcomings. As Ralph Ellison noted in his 1952 novel “Invisible Man,” being unseen is often a result of social marginalization and oppression; in this case, being invisible amounts to not being, or counting, at all. Invisibility, Ms. Busch writes, “can be pejorative, referring to subterfuge, dishonesty, psychic emptiness, a vanishing act, an extinction.” Nonetheless, she insists, “transgression, paranoia, and social disparagement are the most obvious and least interesting things about invisibility.” “Least interesting” goes too far, but her point stands: Disappearing has its advantages.

In the natural world—in a lake or a river or a tree blind—“the human imperative to be seen is shown to be less practical than we think,” she writes. “It is the place where inconspicuousness is power rather than weakness.” The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus once said that “Nature loves to hide,” but this isn’t quite right. Nature loves to hide from us when we insist on being seen. Try being invisible. Try hiding yourself, Ms. Busch suggests, and nature may not be so elusive. “How to Disappear” is, at least in part, a description of how the world might reappear to us if we weren’t so hellbent on overwhelming it.

Here and elsewhere in “How to Disappear” are traces of Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard” (1978), an account of trying to catch sight of an invisible animal presence, a tale, Ms. Busch explains, that “offer[s] an alluring alternative to the self-branding so familiar today. . . a reprieve from reflexive fixations on self and image.”

Ms. Busch doesn’t harp on the idea that we live in a culture of self-branding and, primarily because she doesn’t have to. We already know it: This is the age of social networking, personal data mining and biometrics, all of which assemble and disassemble identities faster than we can say “hello” or “goodbye.” We complain about these violations of privacy as if they were inclement weather, inevitable misfortunes that we are now born to suffer. For the most part, however, these complaints are but banal talking points posted to Facebook, the site of our willing and constant exposure. Very few of us stop posting, sharing or “liking” long enough to consider the virtue of disappearing.

Ms. Busch understands the temptation to make everything garishly public. The willingness to expose ourselves stems from the more basic and powerful drive to be recognized. If one wants to “be somebody,” the first step is to be known by as many people as possible. This rarely involves genuine engagement with others but rather a calculated and obsessive campaign of self-promotion. To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with craving recognition, except that it tends to short-circuit all other forms of self-reliance or self-actualization. There are, in fact, other forms.

The late Victorians had a word for self-possession: They called it “reserve,” the willingness to withdraw, to save, to make something of ourselves inaccessible and therefore precious. If anything is important about a human life, perhaps it is what we keep undercover and then share, sparingly and authentically, with others. This is not exposure. It is revelation, and it means very little in the absence of reserve.

Without reserve or, in Ms. Busch’s words, invisibility, we may be left with painfully little, just a “general disquiet that comes with relinquishing—unreservedly and unconditionally—the personal information that is key to retaining a sense of identity,” Ms. Busch explains. “When private experience is indiscriminately offered for public consumption, ideas of a interior self are easily devalued.”

“Narcissus appears in each culture and each generation in his own particular guise,” Ms. Busch writes. This may be true, but today the pool is so clear, so broad, so tempting that it’s almost impossible not to be transfixed by the reflection. “How to Disappear” resists this temptation. “We are, each one of us,” Ms. Busch reminds us, “less important than we think.” To accept this diminishment of the self is the first step, but also the ultimate insight, of disappearing.

On the surface, “How to Disappear” is a palliative for the alienation that modern overexposure begets. Ms. Busch would like to save us from ourselves, from the lonely fate that afflicts Narcissus, his eyes forever locked on the only person he has ever truly loved—himself. But in its deeper moments, the book touches on an abiding, but easily forgotten, truth: Disappearing, the act of losing our selves, is a precondition of selflessness. Ms. Busch’s deeper concern is to save not Narcissus but rather the wider world his selfishness affects.

‘How to Disappear’ Review: The Unseen Virtues. By John Kaag, The Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2019. 

Albert LaFarge Literary Agency

Akiko Busch website