highly sensitive power

William Gibson is well-known for his science fiction writing, which I love, but my favourite book of his is a non-science fiction novel. Pattern Recognition‘s heroine, Cayce Pollard, is highly sensitive, and that plus Gibson’s mentally chewy writing has made me a happy re-reader of this novel.

Cayce Pollard is highly sensitive in a very particular way. Not only that, but she makes good money selling her sensitivity:

“Google Cayce and you will find ‘coolhunter,’ and if you look closely you may see it suggested that she is a ‘sensitive’ of some kind, a dowser in the world of global marketing.”

In all sorts of ways, Cayce endears. For those of us who are constantly fighting the fashion industry’s insistence on clothing tags that scratch and itch and generally get in the way to the point where we are as eager to cut off the label as we are the price tag once we get home, Cayce could be our champion. She takes fashion-provoked irritability to whole new levels:

“CPUs. Cayce Pollard Units. That’s what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention.

“What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She’s a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity threatens to spawn its own cult.”

But that’s not all there is to Cayce. Using her particular sensitivities and following her curiosities, she gets into odd and dangerous trouble, gets out again, makes friends, and solves mysteries.

Thanks to William Gibson’s skillful creativity, Cayce has a lot to offer as a role model for living the truth, for being ourselves – all freaky little quirks included.