ABSTRACT
There are some things, George Orwell remarked, that are “too normal to be noticed”. This small observation has large implications. Orwell applied it to the drudgery of household staff in Victorian England, whose privations were so commonplace that they escaped comment. The very familiarity of the lives of servants, and the hardships they endured, made them invisible. The same point can be made about more positive things. Some beautiful objects are so ordinary that most people pass them by: the flowers of dandelions and other weeds are largely unobserved because of their sheer abundance. Routine exposure to even the most astounding phenomena tends to hide them from view. Few things are more remarkable than the fact of human self-awareness, yet this fact is so imbedded in our daily experience that we hardly give it a thought. 1
