I'm very busy with other writing right now, but to keep this blog ticking over, here's something I submitted to RTÉ's Sunday Miscellany a few years ago, an attempt to replicate my previous success with that programme. However, it didn't get accepted.
It was a winter morning in University College Dublin. I was passing through the corridor that separates the café from the Student’s Union shop, on my way to work in the library. A man came towards me, pushing a trolley-full of boxes. I glanced at him, without much curiosity. He was dark-haired, medium height, and dressed in a puffy jacket. Nothing particularly notable about any of that.
But as we passed each other, I was struck by a thought, one which had struck me several times before, as I walked the streets of Dublin. Here was somebody whose name I didn’t know, whose story I didn’t know, and whose voice I had never heard. Terra incognita, in human terms. There were ten thousand things I didn’t know about him, and yet I pass him with hardly a second glance.
And not just him, of course. Every day I passed hundreds and hundreds of people, even thousands of people, whose names and stories and souls are a complete mystery to me. And yet I pass them without a second glance, without any sense of wonder or mystery.
I think there is something unnatural about cities, even though they have been with us for thousands of years. There is something unnatural about walking past another human being without feeling a twinge of curiosity about them. After all, a human being is far more interesting than any cave painting, or exotic animal, or piece of architecture. A human being is a universe on two legs. The last verse of the gospel of John reads: “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” The same might not literally apply to the ordinary man or woman; but how many books would be required to record the deeds of a single human life, leaving out nothing? And how many more books would be required to chronicle all the thoughts and emotions of a human life?
Whenever I attend a funeral, I find myself thinking of all the moments that now lie speechless in that coffin or that urn. All the fads and phases; all the sick days, with their unique flavor and atmosphere; all the quiet afternoons, leafing through old magazines or watching old movies; all the times a favourite song was listened to; the sessions in the barber’s chair, in the post office queue, in the train carriage; all the millions moods and atmospheres journeyed through from birth to death, even in a short or an uneventful life.
All of this was contained in the cranium of the man carrying the trolley-full of books. Not only did he carry a universe around within him, but he probably lived in a different universe to me, in the sense that the world would appear to him in a completely different way. A half an hour’s conversation would doubtless have brought me into contact with priorities, fascinations, preoccupations, and fears completely different from my own. It would have given me that sense of shock, familiar but ever new, when we realize that the things that loom so large on our own mental horizon may not even appear on the horizon of others. It is like stepping under an alien sky.
All of this was represented by the man I passed in the corridor, without a second look. Most of is today are destined to live among thousands of strangers. Is it possible that they can remain strangers to us, in the sense that the strange is also the mysterious?
No comments:
Post a Comment