We are insulated from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetive shape of form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, died. There. You may fill in the detials from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snow flakes-forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod, but still unique.
Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, “casualties may rise to a million.” With individual stories, the statstics become people-but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless.
…….We draw our lines around these moments of pain, amd remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearlike, from our souls without real pain.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, theses other places, and look out throughother 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 books, and we resume our lives.
A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.