Self Portrait — Text and Context

A Narrator Who Protests Too Much

Parks's diary entries are thick with self-justification. He assures himself he is tolerant, even as he withdraws a promotion from Goldweiser for a joke about wanting to be God. He claims to have "forgotten all about" his former fiancée Marilyn, yet the conversation about her with Len occupies pages. His language is laced with qualifiers—"of course," "naturally," "I don't mean that"—that often precede a judgment he insists he is not making. When Len explains that Marilyn followed him to New York, Parks replies, "It really doesn't matter," but the diary entry dwells on the subject. The reader quickly learns to read against the grain: what Parks denies often points to what he feels most keenly.

The Unreliable Diary as a Cybernetic Device

The story is told entirely through dated diary entries, a form that mimics the self-monitoring of a cybernetic feedback loop. Parks records his observations, adjusts his behavior (buying dungarees, ordering Martinis), and notes his colleagues' reactions—but his system has a flaw: he cannot see his own biases. The diary becomes a machine that outputs data, but the data is corrupted by the operator's vanity. When he writes that Goldweiser's cynicism "indicates to me a lack of reverence for your job," he reveals more about his own rigidity than about Goldweiser. The form itself—private, confessional, yet performative—invites the reader to become the calibrating observer that Parks himself cannot be.

Echoes of History in a Science-Fiction Setting

Though set in 1959 and framed as cybernetic science fiction, the excerpts carry the weight of recent history. Len's story about Steve Lundy—a former philosophy student who fought in the Spanish Civil War, fled the NKVD, and now reads Norbert Wiener—introduces a shadow world of political violence and exile. Parks, focused on lab hierarchies and personal slights, seems oblivious to this larger context. The mention of the Moscow Trials and friends "shot in the back" is dropped into a conversation about Marilyn, and Parks's response is to order another drink. The contrast between the petty concerns of the diary and the brutal history it brushes against creates a quiet dissonance, suggesting that the "self" in the title may be a deliberately narrow one.

The Missing Portrait: What the Diary Leaves Out

Parks records names, titles, and projects—the Pro lab, the N-Pro lab—but offers almost no description of the actual cybernetic work. The reader learns about IFACS's origins (it took over from the Institute for Advanced Studies, ejecting poets and egyptologists) but not what a typical day in the lab involves. The diary is a record of social maneuvering, not science. More tellingly, Parks never describes his own appearance, his living quarters, or any moment of solitude. The self-portrait is all surface: a man defined by his reactions to others. What he omits—the content of his work, his inner life, the faces of his colleagues—may be the most significant absence in the narrative.

As you read, attend to what Parks does not say. His diary entries are acts of self-presentation, not self-examination; every assertion of tolerance or professionalism is a clue to its opposite. The story's science-fiction premise—cybernetics, secret labs, a mysterious "MS end"—is almost incidental to the human drama of jealousy and self-deception. Let the gaps in the record guide you: the portrait is being painted in negative space.

Some years ago, I sat with Ollie Parks’s diary, watching him claim one truth while confessing another, and I thought how strange it is that we tell ourselves stories to avoid our own reflection. That quiet ache of misremembered motive lingers, I find, in A Question of Identity — A Closer Reading, where every page asks, gently, who we become when no one else is looking.