“In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.”
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Loved this book when I read it, and found this beautiful quote tonight. Robinson has put into crystalline words one of the themes I find myself returning to, which is the impossibility of fully knowing even those we love best, the inescapable loneliness at the heart of life.
I just had a conversation with my friend about this. How there is definitely a loneliness inherent in this stage of our lives, especially when we get everything we thought we wanted. She is a Buddhist and told me that it’s actually OK, that when we are in touch with our broken hearts, we are really in a really rich space.
I find with my husband and kids, I want to know them completely at the same time I want them to be brand new to me.
Usually, when my loneliness bottoms out, I find incredible evidence as to how we are all connected, despite the spaces between us.
xo
“the inescapable loneliness at the heart of life”
What a beautifully sad phrase. I know instantly what you mean by it too. That no matter how much someone loves us, no matter how much we love them, there are still parts of us that are separate. Parts of life that nobody can help us deal with. A place we will always be alone.
I just finished reading “Farewell To Arms” today and came away with this exact same feeling… maybe the best we can do is recognize this loneliness in each other and travel together in honest despair, taking honest pleasures where we find them but not mistaking this for true, albeit impossible, bridging or understanding.
Then again, we so appreciate those artists who at least bring us to a form of kindred unity through his or her very evocation of this desolate truth.
Then again, the Buddhists might say that it is our attachment to our egos in the first place that cause all our suffering. In this sense it might not be ruins upon which we are built but a coral reef that defines us better than any individual node upon that reef.
So, can we really even say “namaste?” (does the light in us really recognize the light in the other?) Or maybe the essence of us truly is the other, only we cannot ever consciously grasp the vast mystery in which we swim.
I’m left with the hope/question about whether or not we can truly love that which we do not understand—be it our lovers, our friends, our children or even the very source of us.
And then again, despite all our disparate ideas, perhaps it is we who are more akin to thoughts and ideas than any fathomable much less tangible “thing.”
Sending all good wishes, even in the thick of confusion and acknowledged universal core isolation.