Man is alone in the world. A woman expects a baby, but that baby in particular, that character? No. She does not even know what sex it will be, she would not recognise a photograph of it when grown. And in death there is eternal isolation. That will be my Hell. I am afraid of dying, but i know my fear is a sin.
By language men have made a show of congregation or society, because the individual is not born with language but learns to navigate with its means, which have been developed and bequeathed by dead men. This sense of being part of something greater is in fact an illusion. A man and woman may live together all their lives and still know little of the essence of the other. They rarely surprise each other, because what is essential to each is never communicated.
Like language, art struggles with what is common, to disturb the individual habit of perception and, by disturbing it, to enable men to see what has been lived and seen by others. By upsetting, therefore, it tries to soothe, because it hopes to free each person from the tyranny of solitude.
No child born knows the world he is entering, and at the moment of his birth he is a stranger to his parents. When he dies, many years later, there may be regrets among those left behind that they never knew him better, but he is forgotten almost as soon as he dies because there is no time for others to puzzle out his life. After a few years he will be referred to once or twice by a grandchild, then by no one at all. Unknown at the moment of birth, unknown after death. This weight of solitude! A being unknown.
And yet, if i believe in God, i am known. On the tombs of the English soldiers, the ones too fragmented to have a name, they wrote ‘Known unto God’. By this they meant that here was a man, who did once have arms and legs and a father and a mother, but they could not find all the parts of him-least of all his name.
God will know me, even as i cannot know myself. If He created me, then He has lived with me. He knows the nature of my temptations and the manner of my failing. So i am not alone. I have for my companion the creator of the world.
At the hour of my death i would wish to be ‘Known unto God’.
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