Our life is like a rocket that springs into light out of darkness,
traverses the sky for a short distance and is extinguished, with darkness then
returning.
Our life is an eye opening and closing on the universe.
The other person looks out on the same world, from an eye placed in a
different position; from a different point of view; he feels, sees, as we do.
For him our world is his world.
We go quickly through life with an observing eye, yoked to the strange body
of an animal. We share much of its life with a chimpanzee, a bird, a beetle,
a whale. As they feel hunger, we feel hunger; as they feel ready to sleep, we
feel ready to sleep; as they feel pain, we feel pain; as they desire to mate,
we desire to mate; as they feel fear, we feel fear.
We exist on top of the churning, multiplex, carefully balanced functioning
of the bodily systems; with us go long stretches of digestive piping, of blood
circulatory piping, the elaborate rods and pulleys of our bones, muscles and
tendons; these, with the organs, heart bumping away, kidneys filtering,
gaseous exchange across the lungs, liver processing, manufacturing chemicals,
and above all brain flashing, flickering, heaving, these all are in us, with
us, here and now, beneath this overall of external flesh.
