2008년 12월 4일 목요일

Island

There are stories that are true, in which each individual's tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others' pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. We know the shape, and the shape does not change. There was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or other, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes - unique in detail, forming patterns we have seen before, but as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection.)

-Neil Gaiman, American gods,page 345 to 346.





After I heard another short news about another suicide.
And saw myself saying 'people born,people die.'
..Yea I'm an Island.and I feel uncomfortable about it.
Something is wrong.Terribly wrong.
But I have no clue how to fix it. And I also know how powerless,meaningless I am.
..
Something's wrong.Give me a reason or give me something to blame.

댓글 2개:

Louie Louie :

I wonder how we become islands.

How we become isolated.

Does the water rise around us?

Or do we build a moat around us?

skitsch :

I got no answer.

Something happened while we weren't able to recognize..

Isolation.