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  • The Paris Review

    The Beauty of Invisibility

    by Jennifer Wilson Feb 25, 2019 6 minutes

    Modified from John Singer Sargent’s Lady Agnew Of Lochnaw, 1892

    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 , Busch contemplates how government surveillance, smart technology, and our own desire 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.

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