Heart of Darkness

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
--John Donne

We live, as we dream -- alone.
--Joseph Conrad

Usually I agree with the Christian poet. Other times, I wonder. Do we kid ourselves about the thousands of souls surrounding us daily? That multitude of humans, whose shoulders rub ours? Beneath the obvious superficial differences, how much do we really share, to what extent are we truly alien?

During lunch hour, I crossed a fairly wide street. The light said "Walk." I was in the crosswalk. From my left, a car waiting at the intersection began moving inexplicably through the red light and crossed in front of me. The car passed far enough ahead of me that I was in no danger of being hit. But it startled me out of my usual pedestrian daydreams. I stopped and glanced at the driver, eyebrows raised, with what was probably an expression of combined puzzlement and mild disgust.

She appeared to be a middle class woman, about 35 or so. She was driving with one hand, holding her cell phone to her ear with the other hand, and talking rapidly. She was preoccupied. But she was not too busy to notice me. She was not too busy to turn her head, look me in the eye, and somehow work one hand free enough to make what our newspapers like to refer to as "an obscene gesture."

Not a big deal, I know. Life in the sort-of-big city. But it made me think. I tried to put myself in her place. Suppose I had intentionally run a red light, impatient with waiting and seeing no traffic coming? And suppose I then observed that I had startled a pedestrian? I probably would have zoomed on, pretending I didn't notice. If I had run the light unintentionally, on the other hand, I probably would have reacted by giving the pedestrian a sheepish grin and kind of shrugging my shoulders in apology.

In either case, it certainly would never occur to me that it was I who was the aggrieved victim, and that it was I who should be angry. It would never occur to me that it was the pedestrian who in some way owed me an apology.

What went through that soccer mom's mind, I mused? Why did she feel that she occupied the moral high ground? Why did she believe that my very presence in the cross walk was an offense to her? That my surprised reaction to her was, in fact, so offensive that a gesture of aggression on her part was required?

My mind wandered, as I myself wandered back to the office. If I had blundered across this strange woman in the jungle, if I had found her equipped with a rifle rather than merely a finger, would she have shot me on the spot and skinned me -- as a trophy perhaps, or maybe for food? Or would she have just shot me absent-mindedly, in passing, as I might slap at an annoying mosquito I hear buzzing near my arm?

Who knows? Who knows what goes on in any other human's mind, when you look behind the polite conventions of civilization? We necessarily take so much on faith, like the New Yorker who trusts that the man standing next to him in the subway station won't shove him onto the third rail. But do we in fact live in a community of like souls, folks motivated much like ourselves? Or are we each still -- at heart -- individual hunters, seeking little but the next meal, whose inner thoughts are unknown and unknowable to each other?

Are we all a bunch of islands, or are we, as Donne would have it, parts of the main?

One need not travel deep into Conrad's jungle to be troubled about the darkness lying within each man's heart. Sometimes, a walk in downtown Seattle will suffice.