A Short Note on the Human Condition

*a wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other*


I just finished A Tale of Two Cities. In addition to needing to have it done by Friday, it was a fantastic work, and I read zealously for long chunks of time until my mind reached its Dickens saturation point, and no more high language and loaded symbolism could be stowed within my head. This novel has weaseled its way into my list of favorite books ever, not merely because it is, on the whole, brilliant, but more because each line, each sentence, exists as an individual statement of truth and beauty. Take the above quote, from chapter 3 of Book the First. It has often amazed me how much I am disconnected from the people I pass every day, how many times a day I ask 'how are you?' and how many times I do not really care what the answer is. But perhaps that is half the beauty of being human, that the true state of a person cannot be candidly known. What kind of world would we live in if everything I ever thought was open and public to anyone who cared to inquire about it. We might learn to live with this after awhile, to not exist in a permanent state of hatred for each other and our profoundly intolerant thoughts for everyone else, but on the whole I think it is better not to know, to view the situation as Dickens does, as wonderful. Ultimately, we were not meant to be open books, no matter how many novels we read.