We don’t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us.
All we can do is tell the other person what we see.
We can point at things and try to name them.
If we do this well,
our friend can look at the world in a new way.
We can meet.
...
I had a big beautiful cake in my head called
“Feeling the Pain of Others”
and I sliced it this way and that because
I thought that emotion is the bridge between people,
sentiment crosses space, sympathy is a gas,
exhaled by one, inhaled by the other. Empathy!
It’s just like melting.
We can merge, you know.
We can connect.
We can cry at the same movie.
You and I.
...
There is a real gap between me and the next person,
there is a space between every human being.
And it is not a frightening space.
The empty air which exists between people
might be crossed by emotion, but it might not.
You need something else, or you need something first…
Now, I think the word we need is “translation.”
...
These days I am obsessed by light, it is so hard to commodify.
I am not talking about a beautiful dawn, or holidays in the sun,
or the light that makes a photograph look good.
I am talking about brightness itself, the air lit up.
The gleam on the surfaces of my typing hands.
I love the gift of its arrival.
The light you see is always eight and a half minutes old.
Always and again.
And you think it is shared by everyone
but it is not shared, exactly —
our eyes are hit by our own,
personal photons.
~ Anne Enright
excerpts from The Wren, the Wren
with thanks to the Marginalian
photo by Don Danko
