405 words, 2 minute read.
I often wonder to what extent I can know the person next to me, whether they be a stranger or someone I have “known” for years of even decades.
If I approach this question from the center, so to speak, I arrive at impossibility. How can I hope to know what goes on at the innermost self of another, where no word leaves or enters and where pure being reigns supreme? I cannot even access that which they verbalise in their minds but choose not to utter to anyone else, never mind to me. Come to think of it, how can I know my own innermost self? Knowing oneself has, for millennia, been recognised as an ultimate goal and challenge. With that unresolved, how can I hope to know another?
If, however, I look at this question from the periphery, from as far from the “center” as possible, I come to the answer of “pretty much completely.” Don’t we both inhabit the same universe? Aren’t we both subject to the same laws of nature? Does the sun not shine on both of us and the rain make both of us scramble for a forgotten umbrella? Do we not both feel esteemed by some and treated with indifference or even disdain by others? Don’t we both seek approval, closeness, tenderness, success, happiness? Don’t we both bleed the same blood, cry the same tears, feel our hearts burn in the presence of love? How insignificant our differences are against this vast shared substrate!
So, which one is it? Are you (who is reading this and whom I may or may not know) and I (whom you may or may not have ever met) impenetrable mysteries to each other or are we both like two peas in a pod? Unsurprisingly, I think: both. The impossibility of full knowledge of another (and oneself) is coextensive with a near–total coincidence of what it is to be human.
And dialogue? I believe it is about those differences that are in an epsilon-neighbourhood of nothing being treasures of immeasurable worth. Treasures that each one of us has as much for themselves as for others. My infinitesimal uniqueness is constitutive of who I am and is prime material for being turned into a gift for you. And, vice versa, receiving some of your infinitesimal uniqueness as a gift enriches me in ways that only you are capable of.
eyebeleave 