I stumbled upon this blog a couple days ago, and there was something really, really weird about it. I stumble upon a lot of blogs on blogger.com's "10 most recently published" list, some of them interesting, many terribly banal, and nearly all forgettable. That one, however, seemed way too tangible and real to me, for the blog of a total stranger. I'm scared because there are people in the world who are like me in surprising ways, but more than that, I'm scared because, in all likelihood, I'll never talk to them, or see them, or recognize them if I should by some chance happen to see them.
The world is unfathomably huge. I don't have a problem with that. My main gripe is that the world is unfathomably huge, and all that surface area is stuffed with experiences I'll never have. Barren deserts, the insane bustle of Tokyo, a prairie filled with waving grass as the sun goes down - how could I ever see it all?
I was born on a foreign planet, blue and brown with the symbols of colonization spreading across tiny patches of land like a concrete fungus. It would be bad enough if this was a beautiful but uninhabited world - a thousand lifetimes would not be enough to appreciate it all. My planet, however, has billions of people as well. Doubtless, if I were to meet them all, I would find the great majority of them as memorable as the next can of Sprite. That leaves me with a small minority of, oh, a few million or so, who I might regard as extraordinary if only I knew them. Whenever this occurs to me, and I truly understand it, there's no room for anything in my mind except shock, awe, and, later, a raging sort of melancholy.
Too often, I forget that all those people outside of my sphere of consciousness have private thoughts, are capable of emotion, have free will. If you see me around, just... do something to remind me that you're alive, and that you don't exist just to react to me. Concerning those I never see or communicate with, though, I'm not sure what anybody can do to help...
posted on Thursday, March 13, 2003
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