p. 30 [142]
One of my constant preoccupations is to understand how other people can exist, how there can be souls that aren’t mine, consciousnesses that have nothing to do with my own, which – because it’s a consciousness – seems to me like the only one. I accept that the man standing before me, who speaks with words like mine and gesticulates as I do or could do, is in some sense my fellow creature. But so are the figures from illustrations that fill my imagination, the characters I meet in novels, and the dramatic personae that move on stage through the actors who represent them.
I suppose no one truly admits the real existence of another person. We may concede that the person is alive and that he thinks and feels as we do, but there will always be an unnamed element of difference, a materialized inequality. There are figures from the past and living images from books that are more real to us than the incarnate indifferences that talk to us over shop counters, or happen to glance at us in the trams, or brush against us in the dead happenstance of the streets. Most people are no more for us than scenery, generally the invisible scenery of a street we know by heart.
No, others don’t exist … It’s for me that this heavy-winged sunset lingers, its colours hard and hazy. It’s for me that the great river shimmers below the sunset, even if i can’t see it flow. It’s for me that this square was built overlooking the river, whose waters are now rising.
One of my constant preoccupations is to understand how other people can exist, how there can be souls that aren’t mine, consciousnesses that have nothing to do with my own, which – because it’s a consciousness – seems to me like the only one. I accept that the man standing before me, who speaks with words like mine and gesticulates as I do or could do, is in some sense my fellow creature. But so are the figures from illustrations that fill my imagination, the characters I meet in novels, and the dramatic personae that move on stage through the actors who represent them.
I suppose no one truly admits the real existence of another person. We may concede that the person is alive and that he thinks and feels as we do, but there will always be an unnamed element of difference, a materialized inequality. There are figures from the past and living images from books that are more real to us than the incarnate indifferences that talk to us over shop counters, or happen to glance at us in the trams, or brush against us in the dead happenstance of the streets. Most people are no more for us than scenery, generally the invisible scenery of a street we know by heart.
I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters described in books and certain images I’ve seen in prints than I feel with many supposedly real people, who are of that metaphysical absurdity known as 'flesh and blood'. In fact ‘flesh and blood describes them rather well: they resemble cuts of meat displayed in the window of a butchery, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive, shanks and cutlets of Destiny/ the sirloin steaks and cutlers of Fate.
I’m not ashamed of feeling this way, as I’ve discovered that’s how everyone feels. The lack of respect between men, the indifference that allows them to kill others without compunction (as murderers do) or without thinking that they are killing (as soldiers do), comes from the fact that no one pays due to attention to the apparently abstruse idea that other people have souls too.
…No, others don’t exist … It’s for me that this heavy-winged sunset lingers, its colours hard and hazy. It’s for me that the great river shimmers below the sunset, even if i can’t see it flow. It’s for me that this square was built overlooking the river, whose waters are now rising.
