No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main;
-John Donne
He was wrong, Mr. Donne, all men are islands we are isolated from one another. Isolated, a word that actually means made into islands.
You look around you.
You see suffering.
You see a homeless man lost in the torpor of his drunkenness, his face lined with pain and misery, would it help to know his name? his age? his dreams? his now long forgotten hopes?
And if it does help then would it not be unfair to the other homeless man sitting next to him? or the countless starving children in those forsaken lands? to the single mother? to the betrayed lover?
We are all islands. for if we weren’t we would all be lost, drowned in each others tragedies.
we draw imaginary lines around other people’s suffering. and remain upon our islands, that their pain cannot hurt us.
There are life stories, unique, and yet like so many others that were we to know about them they would cut us too deeply.
We are all islands. We have to be.
