Monday, December 20, 2010

Knowing we're in it together

Artist: John Leech

I don't know if this is still true or if it was ever true, really. What I know is that we would all benefit by seeing each other as "fellow-passengers to the grave..." rather than completely different sorts of beings:

I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that -- as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on their journeys.

~

-- Charles Dickens from A Christmas Carol

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