WITCH DOCTORS
"The man who managed, by an imagination overflowing with pity, to record all the sufferings, to be contemporary with all the pain and all the anguish at any given moment - such a man - supposing he could ever exist - would be a monster of love and the greatest victim in the history of the human heart.
But it is futile to imagine such an impossibility. We need merely to proceed to an investigation of ourselves, only undertake the archaeology of our alarms. If we venture into the torment of the days, it is because nothing halts this march except our pangs; those of others seem to us explicable and capable of being transcended: we believe they suffer because they lack sufficient will, courage, or lucidity. Each suffering, except ours, seems to us legitimate or absurdly intelligible; otherwise, mourning would be the unique constant in the versatility of our sentiments.
But we wear only the mourning of ourselves. If we could understand and love the infinity of agonies which languish around us, all the lives which are hidden deaths, we should require as many hearts as there are suffering beings. And if we had a miraculously present memory which sustained the totality of our past pains, we should succumb beneath such a burden.
Life is only possible by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory.”