“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!” [1].
Charles Dickens, in one of his most famous novels, "A Tale of Two Cities," postulates that no one can fully know someone else. This quote has always saddened and frustrated me because, while I agree that one person can never know every thought and quirk and opinion of another, I truly believe that we are not such great mysteries to each other as Dickens would think. After all, we are all human, and as such we share an incredibly fundamental quality. We are all empathetic creatures. Even if we cannot fully understand each other, we should be able to understand some part of each other’s motivations for our actions. However, I do not think that we put enough work into this most important of tasks.
There have been so many acts of cruelty in the recent past that it is hard to recount them all. Nice, Turkey, Orlando; these events can cause us to demonize the people who perpetrated them, and sometimes to demonize entire groups of people because of the actions of one of their number. However, we are all people. Sometimes I want to scream this sentence again and again until it sinks in. We are all people. Within each of us is the potential for great cruelty and for great kindness. We are all capable of the same sorts of things that we see on the daily news. I am not trying to exonerate these people. However, I do firmly believe that seeing people as people is the first step in treating them as such. The lorry driver in Nice was human, just as I myself am human, just as we all are.
As a writer myself, I feel that the best way for me to understand other people is to read what they have written. In high school my class read "Heart of Darkness" and "Things Fall Apart," which are both pictures of European colonialism, but told from different sides of the story. It was eye-opening for me to read a book from the perspective of Igbo tribesman, and I decided that from that point on I was going to widen my scope. I was going to read books by writers who were outside of the Western literary tradition. I wanted to understand where these people were coming from. I wanted a picture of their humanity.
The solution to this problem is different for every person. I am a very literary-minded person, so reading helps me cross cultural divides. However, some people may need to go out and talk to people who are different from them. Some people may find an entirely different way. Regardless of method, understanding people of other cultures and classes and religions is vital if we are to grow into the sort of people who can discuss rather than argue. The sort of people who understand that we are all people, and that we all have fears and motivations and desires, and that these are not so different as we might like to think.
[1] 345 Dickens, Charles. Charles Dickens Four Novels: "The Adventures of Oliver Twist or the Parish Boy's Progress" / A.. S.l.: Canterbury Classics, 2010. Print.
