In America, to be ID'd - sorted, tagged, and permanently filed - is to lose a bit of one's soul. To die a little. This sounds like a subtle, poetic notion. It's not. In American legal and cultural tradition, one essential privilege of citizenship is not having to prove it on demand.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the idea that being reduced to mere identification can strip away one's individuality and essence.
Walter Kirn's quote suggests that in American society, the act of being identified and labeled can diminish a person's unique identity and essence. It raises concerns about the societal expectation to constantly prove one's identity, which can lead to a feeling of losing a part of oneself in the process. The quote critiques the dehumanizing aspects of bureaucracy and the pressure to conform to societal norms.
In practice
A speech on the importance of personal identity in the face of bureaucratic systems.
To young people born under the weird planet of the SAT, intelligence was equated with agility, with raw acuity. It produced a certain sort of person of which I was a typical specimen: the mental contortionist, able to rise to almost every challenge placed before him, except the challenge of real self-knowledge.
Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious, very thin ones as more honest, more real. Writers address these age-old expectations by filling their big books with philosophy and cramming their little ones with feeling.
Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction.
The wise soul feareth not death; rather she sometimes striveth for death, she goeth beyond to meet her. Yet eternity maintaineth her substance throughout time, immensity throughout space, universal form throughout motion.
Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.
A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom- he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.
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