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.
For tyme ylost may nought recovered be.
People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it is. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped.
Our stories may be singular, but our destination is shared.
Money, like vodka, turns a person into an eccentric.
The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.
We came whirling out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust... _x000D_ The stars made a circle, and in the middle, we dance.
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