Man/Island

No man , proclaimed Donne , is an island , and he was wrong.If we were not islands , we would be lost , drowned in each other's tragedies.We are insulated (a word that means , literally , made into an island) from the tragedy of others , by our island nature , and by the repetitive shape and form of stories.The shape does not change :there was a human being who was born , lived ,and then , by some means or another , died.There .You may fill in the details from your own unique experience.As unoriginal as any other tale ,. as unique as any other life.Lives are snowflakes -forming patterns we have seen before , as like one another as peas in a pod .

Without individuals , we see only numbers : a thousand dead , a hundred thousand dead, "casualities may rise to a million"
With individual stories , the statistics become people -but even that is a lie , for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless.Look, see the child's swollen belly , and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs : will it make it easier for you to know his name , his age , his dreams , his fears ?To see him from inside ? And if it does , are we not doing a disservice to his sister , who lies in the searing dust beside him , a distorted , distended caricature of a human child ?And there, if we feel for them , are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine , a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children ?

We draw our lines around these moments of pain , and remain upon our islands , and they cannot hurt us .They are covered with a smooth , safe , nacreous layer to let them slip , pearllike , from our souls without real pain.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads , these other places , and look out through other eyes .And then in the tale we stop before we die , or we die vicariously and unharmed , and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book , and we resume our lives.

A life that is , like any other , unlike any other.
Neil Gaiman -American Gods

I was going to write about how we are selective in our perceptions of the world...on how we are slectively blind; seeing only what we want to see , selectively deaf ; hearing only what we want to hear , and finally feeling only what we want to feel.
A physics lecturer once told me that our selective-ness or his so called filters in the mind were the basic survival features of the mind.The mind would simply freeze if it took in all the sights and sounds , unfiltered and unvarnished.These filters are what autistic persons lack.In lacking such filters they find it hard to fit into the world of the so-called sane people.

But , Neil Gaiman here threw me out of loop (To quote Ms.J ).I had to post Neil Gaiman (screw the copyright infringements) so that I did not forget.