'Be to her virtues very kind, to her faults a little blind" =)
My subject heading has nothing to do with what i've written here, cept its a quote from The Sandman series, (its the headstone of Johanna Constatine, a name which is reccurent in many comics) written by Neil Gaimen. Please read anyway, i know its long but its worth it.
This is a quote from the book American Gods by comic book author Neil Gaiman- he is a genious and in my opinon a modern day shakespeare. This is actually a character in the book writing a passage. its really an amazing thing when someother human can put so elequently into words, what is just a jumble of thoughts and emotions in my head.
"No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. if we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in eachothers tragedies. We are insulated ( a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature and by the repitive shape and form of the stories. the shape does not change; there was a human being who was born, lived, and then by some means or another died. there. you may fill in the details from your own experience. as unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life.
Lives are snowflakes: forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod ( and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? i mean really looked at them? Theres not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minutes close inspection) but still unique.
Without indiviguals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead 'casualties may rise to a million'. With indivigual stories, the statisitcs become people- but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. look, see the childs swollen belly, the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? and if it does are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the sering dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? and there. if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who wil soon be food for the flies.
we draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. they are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let tem slip, pearl like fom our souls without real pain.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. and then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the wrold beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
a life, which is, like any other, unlike any other."
This is a quote from the book American Gods by comic book author Neil Gaiman- he is a genious and in my opinon a modern day shakespeare. This is actually a character in the book writing a passage. its really an amazing thing when someother human can put so elequently into words, what is just a jumble of thoughts and emotions in my head.
"No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. if we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in eachothers tragedies. We are insulated ( a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature and by the repitive shape and form of the stories. the shape does not change; there was a human being who was born, lived, and then by some means or another died. there. you may fill in the details from your own experience. as unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life.
Lives are snowflakes: forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod ( and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? i mean really looked at them? Theres not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minutes close inspection) but still unique.
Without indiviguals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead 'casualties may rise to a million'. With indivigual stories, the statisitcs become people- but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. look, see the childs swollen belly, the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? and if it does are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the sering dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? and there. if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who wil soon be food for the flies.
we draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. they are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let tem slip, pearl like fom our souls without real pain.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. and then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the wrold beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
a life, which is, like any other, unlike any other."