When selecting quotations for this blog, I tend to select quotations about books and reading. It gives me a vague sense of purpose; a theme with which to constrain myself. This quotation isn’t strictly about reading, but it is about communication, and how we can never be truly sure we understand one another. And it blows me away every time I read it.
It makes me think, of course, of John Donne’s Meditations. But also of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and the efforts of the academy in Lagado to minimise errors in interpretation by using physical objects in place of words. It even reminds me of that old philosophical chestnut of how we interpret colour — do we each see the same shade of blue, or have we simply learned to call our disparate perceptions of one shade “blue”?
“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (Penguin, 1973), p.13.
Infinite Typewriters 