One of the things I enjoyed in the Twilight Series is the various kinds of mind-reading. (Here's a really interesting article that suggests the mind-reading the werewolf pack does is a metaphor for life as a tribal person.) I think Meyer does a wonderful job writing conversations where one or several of the participants are not actually speaking. These conversations are often very funny.
Most of the time we don't get to know what is going on in other people's minds. We know what they tell us or what we observe - so our knowledge is always partial.
My friend Tara loves Sara Groves and got me listening to her music, too. Over time Tara has posted the lyrics to most of the songs on Groves' latest album, Tell Me What You Know.
I don't think she has posted these lyrics, and reading Breaking Dawn, in the weird way in which my mind works, made me think of this song. In the liner notes Groves quotes from A Soldier of the Great War, by Mark Helprin:
We're too weak to feel the full import of such a loss...It would take more than anyone can give to understand the life of one other person...you cannot know anything but the smallest part of the love, regret, excitement and melancholy of one [life]. And Two? And Three? At two you have entered the realm of abstraction.
Abstraction
The girl looks out from the window of the airplane
20,000 feet up in the sky
She picks a rooftop in the middle of the town
And wonders what is happening inside
The TV in the kitchen flashes faces
The woman slowly pushes in the chairs
Her neighbor's son is fighting in the army
She's concentrating to remember where
Who can know the pain, the joy, the regret, the satisfaction
Who can know the love of one life, one heart, one soul
At two you're at abstraction
The man is waiting for the bus into the city
He grabs a drink and slowly reads the Times
His heart is captured by a story of a child
Around the world but always on his mind
A million this a million that
Vast sums of individuals
A million here a million there
Made up of a million souls
It's true, isn't it? We feel things so deeply, think thoughts that completely absorb our attention, live lives that seem incredibly important to us. Yet it's hard for us to enter into others' experience. Especially, as the song says, when we're talking of millions of souls. That's one of the reasons I like to read, because it gives me an opportunity to see things from other points of view, and opens my mind, often, to completely new ways of looking at life. At that point, I can get beyond the abstraction.
The Poetry Friday roundup is here today.
2 comments:
Good thoughts... And when it comes down to it, even our knowledge of ourselves isn't complete. We need others -- to reveal themselves, and to help reveal hidden parts of ourselves, too.
I have not posted that song -- and it is one that makes me think too. Hope you guys get some good rest this weekend.
tara
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