We're trying out some new (well, re-purposed) chairs in the WES library. The new ones are much smaller than the big, clunky ones we've been using...and as I sat in them today I got to thinking about how the big ones kept us just a bit further apart from each other. They even had wheels, so we could make a quick getaway!
There are so many ways we try to keep other people at arm's length. I especially notice this when I'm driving--I encounter so many people on the road, but encased in our own steel boxes I don't really see them at all. And how about buying groceries or pumping gas? We might murmur "thank you" or nod hello, but do we ever actually look into the eyes of the person no more than five feet away from us? The other human being sharing our space?
I came across a wonderful passage about the power of really seeing another person during my summer fiction-reading blitz. Like the best fiction, it starts out with the very particular and becomes a treatise on how to live. I'll leave you with it, from Alexander McCall Smith's wonderful Sunday Philosophy Club series:
"She moved away from the rug shop. A man inside, anxiously waiting for customers, had seen her and had been watching her. Isabel had looked through the glass, beyond the piles of rugs, and had met his gaze. She was sensitive to such encounters, because in her mind they were not entirely casual. By looking into the eyes of another, one established a form of connection that had moral implications. To look at another thus was to acknowledge one’s shared humanity with him, and that meant one owed him something, no matter how small that thing might be. That was why the executioner was traditionally spared the duty of looking into the eyes of the condemned; he observed him by stealth, approached from behind, was allowed a mask, and so on. If he looked into the eyes, then the moral bond would be established, and that moral bond would prevent him from doing what the state required: the carrying out of its act of murder."
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