lately

So lately (and just for clarifications sake, in this instance I mean for like the few months or maybe even the last year or so) I have been loving things (the majority of which are character-driven books) that show individuals as individuals, or that try to address how difficult it is for us as humans to really grasp the idea of another person's consciousness as being completely separate and just as valid and important as our own. Or anything like that.

I was thinking about this more specifically last night and this morning.

I was reading about a girl, who reminded me very much of many people I know, who offhandedly and quite without meaning to assumed that since her friend hadn't experienced the same things, or things that appeared to be equally difficult, she was somehow a nonentity. A person who existed, but, in her mind at least, was somehow less significant. Even in a work of fiction, this frustrated me to no end (likely because I am usually the one who hasn't had to face many difficult events in the course of my life). Nonetheless, it seems wrong the invalidate the existence of another person, even unintentionally or just in part.

I think this is one of the biggest reasons why I love Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. First, her choice of characters makes you consider people who you probably haven't before. By putting you inside of their heads, you see how these people you may not have even considered before have feelings and experiences that are at time uncannily and poignantly similar to your own. Secondly these characters are shown to be so different, particularly a preacher married much later in life whose major struggle has been loneliness in a town full of people who know and love him and a once young man from a respectable loving family whose intense struggles and sorrows have come about as a result of his self-destructive decisions. But their reactions to their individual difficulties and their internal struggles are shown to be much more similar than they are generally willing to admit.

And on that somewhat incomplete note, I will conclude and let you (if you are so inclined) try to get a better understanding of what I have been thinking about from these quotes that are all somehow related in my mind.

"Well, see and see but do not perceive, hear and hear but do not understand, as the Lord says. I can't claim to understand that saying, as many times as I've heard it, and even preached on it. It simply states a deeply mysterious fact. You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love an mutual incomprehension."

"There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either."

-Marilynne Robinson

"She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have."

-Ian McEwan

"How much larger your life would be if you could become smaller in it. You would begin to be interested in others. You would break out of this tiny theater in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers."

-G.K. Charleston

Also, I have been loving parenthetical thoughts and compound modifiers.