A common thread through us all

I often describe myself as a misanthrope, an individual cell of the societal body, violently independent from the whole. I am hostile to the ideologies of my neighbors. I do not appropriate much of my time to their petty and over dramatized social games. I have no regard for their useless sentiments and ill conceived ideals. Alliances of convenience have me posted in the trenches of their culture wars. My enemy in such is alien to me, and I can in many cases claim to abhor everything that he stands for. With a slip of the tongue, I may call him villainous and evil. He is the great Satan to me and I to him.

This separation is not unique to me. Human civilization has defined itself since its conception by the ways it can find to divide itself. Even putting aside the obvious divisions between large scale factions in religion and philosophy, each individual one of us is an island unto his or her self, separated if not by ideals then by experience, interpretation, imagination, communication; the very air between each of us has us divided. We will never know the same cosmos as our neighbor. That is why we fight each other.

We spend the entirety of our lives listening to no one else's thoughts but our own. That is what it means to be lonely. The naive realists don't see it as such. They live for an instant, spend that instant locked in an empty chamber; they hear a voice and feel they have company, but the voice is their own, a rough translation of sounds reverberating from beyond the walls; they mutter the sounds back to themselves, applying their own internally conceived context to it. They think there's someone there to talk to, but they're only speaking to themselves.

So is it foolish of me to suspect, even hope, that despite all of these dividing elements there is a common thread that runs through us all? Are we not all fragile creatures, born of the same stuff and aware of our tininess, our own helplessness, our own isolation, our own impermanence? Can't a humanist atheist look into the eyes of a devout Christian and with all the sincerity in the world say to her, "I understand."

Can't we derive some comfort from knowing, that no matter our frailty, no matter our isolation, we are all in this miserable mess? Can't we relate on at least that much?

We are all mortal, and it hurts, but at least we're not alone in that. I wonder how many see this as I do.



All we wonder,
No-one ever denies,
If once given life we must die.

So bow down with me,
Where summer fades into fall,
And leave your hatchets of hate.
Bow down with me,
And sing the saddest of all,
The song we all serenade.