Of Human Bondage
“He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each
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I often feel a kind of warm anonymity in crowds like the airport. Being one of a milling crowd who share so many things, unique though we are. We all have our story. The girl leaving home to go to university, the tall guy carrying a mandolin case, the beautiful black girl who keeps smiling at her new engagement ring, the East Indian family where the mother wears traditional clothes and the daughter dresses very modern. All of us moving towards something, all of us gypsies for the moment.
Sometimes I judge unfairly, the snooty-looking woman in her expensive clothes, the morbidly obese man with the protruding feminine arse, whoever it is that smells like old goat cheese stinking up the plane. Yet I do feel a comradeship with all of them, especially if our eyes meet and we say something human to one another.
It's sort of a metaphor for life itself, the whole journey thing, and how to pass the time, and what that journey might mean. The ever-pressing movement to something and away from something, the duality of endings and beginnings, the commanality among humanity.
I'm not too worried about people looking at me. What expectations could they possibly have that I don't meet? I am me, in all my me-ness. It's all I could ever be, and I am myself to my fullest. I add to the microcosmic world of the here and now what everyone else does. In return, I try to see the story in everyone, and see the value in that.
The root of compassion. We are all vulnerable.
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