A basic part of being a person that feels things is knowing it’s pretty much impossible to relate those feelings precisely to anybody else.
Emotions, smells, injury. Future neural links will change this, I’m sure – we’ll be able to feel what another feels when they look at their child, or watch Tom Cruise run – but for now it’s guesswork. Say you and I drink a beer at the same moment. I have an idea how it tastes, the carbonation perceived, the temperature of the liquid when it touches your teeth. But I can’t be certain I know exactly what those sensations are to you, let alone your emotional response.
In one of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s essay collections, Autumn, he writes about how difficult it is to talk about pain, or understand what someone else is going through.
We can see that someone is in pain, and we can understand that it hurts, but the distance between the concept of pain and pain itself is so great that not even the deepest compassion can bridge it; we are forever strangers to the pain of others. This means that the person in pain is always alone.
This is all on my mind because lately I’ve built up an appetite for doing things without thinking about them too much. It’s the pandemic. Fatigue from being wary. I’ve been Covid-conservative for two-plus years – to my knowledge, I still haven’t caught it – and I continue to wear the KN95 in movie theaters, at grocery stores. But I wonder for how much longer. I know I’m sick of thinking about it. Last week, suddenly I’m researching nearby tattoo parlors.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Meditations in an Emergency to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.