Irreplaceable You (and You, and You)

As we waited in line for the ferry from Mill Bay to Brentwood Bay this afternoon, we watched as an elderly gentleman from the car in line behind us got out and began to pick wild blackberries from the bushes along the road.  After he had a cup full of them, he started to walk past us toward his vehicle.  “Are they sweet?” my wife asked.

Those were pretty much the last words that she spoke for the next hour, until the ferry arrived and we needed to board.

We learned about his escape from his native Hungary shortly after the abortive Hungarian Revolution (against the Soviets) in 1956.  He managed to sneak singly across the border, and — this is his account — was hidden from the border guards in a massive pile of hay that had a door and a secret chamber within it.  It had apparently been designed for just such use.

We learned about his various jobs, and about his few brief visits to the United States.  He marveled that American food was so very similar to Canadian food.

His stories were actually quite interesting, but it was difficult not to laugh aloud at the sheer, unaided, stream-of-consciousness manner of their delivery.  Probably four times, maybe five times, he thanked us for the entertaining conversation — we also offloaded to him some of the fruit and canned drinks that we wouldn’t be able to take with us on the plane — and then continued talking without so much as taking a pause for a breath .

Our encounter with him made me think, once again, how much I value people.  They are, without question, the most complicated and interesting objects known to us in the natural universe — human brains alone are far more complicated than any star or galaxy — and the permanent loss of any one of them would be an irredeemable tragedy.

That’s one of the reasons that the question of life after death seems to me so very, very important.

I recently cited a quotation from the late astronomer, astrophysicist, and science popularizer Carl Sagan, but it seems apropos here, as well:

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”

In this context, too, I can’t help but think (yet again! you may say) of one of my favorite passages from a wartime essay by (the irreplaceable) C. S. Lewis:

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”  (C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory)

Posted from Seattle, Washington