We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, we feel all their actions, all their sufferings.
We don't know what it is like to be any creature other than ourselves — the bird, the dog, the person we love. The great triumph is to let the fantasy of understanding go and love anyway.
I was trying to find the human side of history, and humans were often my best source. When I thought about Sacajawea in the Rockies, trying to keep her infant son alive, I thought about my own kids at that age—about my wife breastfeeding them, both parties always hungry, always thirsty.
It is, of course, impossible to ever fully know what it is like to be someone else — this is the cost of consciousness, singular and secretive as it is; impossible, too, to fully convey to another what it is like to be you. The dream of perfectly clear vision is indeed just a dream. But we can always see a little more clearly in order to love a little more purely.
4w ago
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, we feel every quiver that passes through them as a shock to our own nerves.
Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what's the problem?
1mo ago
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.
2mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
