Those words .. . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.

A.S. Byatt
About This Quote

When we speak of the self, we use words like: I, you, we and they. By using these words we are defining ourselves and saying who we are. We may think of ourselves as a “nation” however we do not define ourselves in this way. We define ourselves as a “family” instead.

A family is a group of people who care for each other and want to protect each other. We define ourselves against others in order to make us more unique and special than everyone else, the identity of a culture (place, language and history). By saying that we are a nation and that we have a portrait, we say that we have a face and that we can be seen by everyone in the world.

By saying that we have a portrait, this means that we can be defined by our actions and what we do in life.

Source: The Virgin In The Garden

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