Friday, October 2, 2009

Particularity of pain

One of my most significant writers is Loren Eiseley. In one of his essays he studies his hands admiring their dexterity.

He asks us to consider " their first painful venture on the pebbly shore" and immidiately my mind travels back to that probably ugly, not yet amphibian creature struggling out off a puddle of water, not for scientific exploration, not from a sense of adventure but from bland necessity to find more water.

This is the journey we are all on and it makes my suffering trivial and takes away the particularity of my pain. I am part of this journey even if the human race becomes extinct because of drought, famine, greed or just playing human foolishness and ends up like the sabre-toothed tigers locked in death with a tooth in each other's skull.

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