The Evanescent Bridge, or the Value of Vulnerability
The autumn today has no difference from the hundreds that came before it — generous, warm, and flat across the unrippled water. I’m sitting at the small, roughly sculpted wooden table outside my cabin, and a stack of slightly yellowed paper and a quill dipped in an ink bottle elegantly rest beside my hand. The fragmented reflections of the lake move silently like waves over the edges, with their images undulating across my lap and arms, to places far away. I stand up. Scrutinizing me, this pond vividly breathes and responds to my friendly sights: it is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature.
It is earth’s eye; looking into which the watcher measures the depth of his own nature. Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond, in a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite shore line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, “the glassy surface of a lake.” When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another.
Unbelievable peacefulness is poured into my closed heart, telling me that the charm of this lake varies day by day in its form and intensity, which occupies every muscle of my body and comforts me by a meditative stretch. As I write, I feel so eager to transmit this rare feeling, including the passion of life, to every living human: that’s why I write. I see the ink dripping slowly from the quill, realizing that this action is the sole medium, or the bridge between my readers and me, and so I begin to ponder about that: when one reads my works, one must try to understand my thoughts if one is a careful, focused model reader. If one has experienced an epiphanic moment or similar, one will feel motivated to read more. Regardless of the genre, then, one could find an explanation of what one perceived or form a personal interpretational structure to the text, which is the reason behind one’s epiphany: in fictions, for instance, a character arc could suddenly resonate with one; in non-fictions, on the other hand, the article could’ve used earnest efforts to convince one. Moreover, analogical moments happen in every type of interaction between humans, not only reader to author, but also student and teacher, strangers or lovers. Whether one’s conclusions or thoughts from reading are correct or reasonable, surprisingly or ordinarily, won’t alter the result: one can feel the sense of being connected, being recognized or that another individual in the world has built a very precise bridge between them. Thus, my current medium — language, words, or literature — is just a simple example, so is love, art, music and philosophy (“humanities”). Nonetheless, is this medium powerful enough to break the natural barrier? It’s necessary to discuss.
Nowadays, when people read historians, philosophers and eminent writers, no matter how many sources and experts we have, we couldn’t rightly and confidently ascertain what they truly meant. Even among living people, it’s impossible for all of us to enter others’ heads and reveal what they are thinking. Hence, we come to that every person is alone, destined. Imagine that a perfect, human couple are having a discussion, and they assure that they are the one who knows each other the most. They could understand the language each says, and they can “feel” that they’re loving each other. Unfortunately, even love has different forms, and we can’t say that any of them is completely being aware of what the other is thinking exactly. That’s why we are all independent islands, forever.
But even if we couldn’t make a perfect bridge between islands, which, in simple words, is understanding others completely, humans are social animals, so we desire to know others’ feelings — imprinted in instincts, we’d like to understand, to experience and to get close to others. That’s why we have invented language, culture and country. We will be invulnerably self-contained if everyone doesn’t need anyone. It is this real, actual and natural vulnerability of relationship between people that brings human’s fear of alienation, desire to bridge across barrier and transcendence over solitude to the world, and thus humanity.
Some squirrels’ squeakings catch my attention just now, so I dip my quill in the ink bottle. Their voices have no big difference from our speeches and laughters. But why is human, or humanity, special? Same as social animals, squirrels are known to gather together, to find acorns together, but they, as we admit, are not as intelligent as we are, and their feelings are limited to primitive desires. I pick the quill up. They reject solitude because their instincts are demanding, yet the hollowness that humans feel does not exist in them. For more intelligent animals that are similar to humans even possibly understanding love, desire and companionship, they don’t feel as harmed as humans feel when they face solitude: because we, readers, authors and lovers, have used so many tools to convey resonance of spiritual thoughts before. Once we got higher above the clouds, it is hard to back to darkness. Because they aren’t “vulnerable” enough, there doesn’t exist a place of this pain in their heads, and so doesn’t humanity.
I dip my quill again and continue.
Even in the future, perhaps when machines and fabricated objects become alive, when steam engines and auto puppets become utopian inventions, when they are so smart that they have much better knowledge and internal capacity to explore spiritual or advanced thoughts and theories than humans, they are artificial. We make them, so we have the ability to open a puppet’s head, check every piece of gear, write an instruction booklet and check it from the bottom to top. I could see wires of telegrams buried beneath the ground, connecting places efficiently as they could: in the future, perhaps when our works become alive, using the language we couldn’t decode, when they communicate without barrier, using advanced symbols, when wires of telegrams occupy the whole world, it will be a terrible silence. However, vulnerability disappears, evidently, but in a different way from animals: we are not capable of seeing others — where there is no friction, there is no warmth — as stated, so no gaps exist in those artifacts, where no courage is required to cross these gaps, where no randomness is needed, where no vulnerability remains.
As a result, we can see how special, unique humans are. It’s an extremely unreasonable being created by the nature. The impossibility of human relationships determines humans’ tragedy but frees our minds. Every reader can have their own interpretation or opinion of the author while there is never a correct answer. In another sense, in an ideal world without “humanity”, everything will be too definite. We, as humans, are more random, unpredictable, weak and indefinite, which is the pivot of humanity.
When I finish the final fancily written letter, I quiet my mind. Just like every summer evening before, I have my short meditation watching the distant sky. I want my words to be a dream that reveals its power in readers’ sleep. When they look upon me at this table, seeing a single body with double shadows, I want them to look back at their own lives. I want them to examine their own overstuffed gardens and the clockwork machinery of their days.
The sun hasn’t gone down yet: a tweed rose color replaces the cerulean waves of foggy weather in the morning forecasting the arrival of an unclouded night. Squirrels have already returned to nests, earlier than normal. I haven’t put my quill down yet, and it speaks on the page: do not blame with imperfection or overlook instability, therefore. It is the essence of this world bringing you and I together. Do not give up on finding an ideal state as well. It is this motivation cultivating our history. Those lines are commonplaces, tiringly discussed by generations and generations — but they are true so that they can’t be neglected. The central idea in those lines is hope. Please do have hope to the dream in hardship because hope elevates vulnerability to a true humanity, and we could be hopeful since we were born. “We want, so we hope,” I murmured. Implying that if one arrives the goal one ends the pursuring process, exceeding the incompletion and meeting the boredom, hope doesn’t mean completeness.
Initially, I feel confused about what I’ve written, but a quiet relaxation helps me to understand. The sun has completely sunk beneath the wooded hills, and the cool shadow of the Concord woods falls throughout my small wooden table now. I could imagine what the writers of the twentieth century will say of me: a strict individualist or a peculiar hermit. They are, in fact, right. The figure named Thoreau preferred the reposeful world inside this forest with white pine and nocturnes by birds and foxes instead of human society.
Yet, as the ink dries and this imagery in the nineteenth century is painted on these yellowed pages forever, a bizarre wind passes through my quill. The night makes a fluent change in the whole scenery, casting a shadow and revealing a mask. I build the opera house, the reinterpretation, escaping from my overstuffed garden; when I put my mind back to where it should be, I see how he, the hermit and the giant, has already provided me with the base: I have borrowed his imagination to construct an evanescent bridge between two souls. But wait — that’s not the end. Who also made a bridge is you, the equally immersive reader. It is no longer the owner of this pond begging for connection; it is my mind reaching out, and your eyes reaching back. These two bridges intersect and illuminate at the same point, where we write vividly the last sentence together: humans are unique for their vulnerability.
Notes on References
The descriptions of the lake about “earth’s eye” and the inversion of the head in paragraphs 1 and 2 are adaptations from the "Ponds" chapter of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (originally published in 1854).
References
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Yale University Press, 2006.