Wednesday, June 2, 2010

"The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people."

Unless people are near in soul they had better not be near in neighbourhood. The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people. And there is a real human reason for this. You think of a remote man merely as a man; that is, you think of him in the right way. Suppose I say to you suddenly-"Oblige me by brooding on the soul of the man who lives at 351, High Street, Islington." Perhaps (now I come to think of it) you are the man who lives at 351, High Street, Islington; for this journal has a wide circulation. In that case substitute some other unknown address and pursue the intellectual sport. Now you will probably be broadly right about the man in Islington whom you have never seen or heard of, because you will begin at the right end- the human end. The man is Islington is certainly a soul. He also has been bewildered and broadened by youth; he also has been tortured and intoxicated by love; he also is sublimely doubtful about death. You can think about the soul of that nameless man who is a mere number in Islington High Street. But you do not think about the soul of your next-door neighbour. He is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a pianola; he is a dispute about a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are better than yours. Now, all these are the wrong ends of a man; and a man, like many other things in this world, such as a cat-o'-nine-tails, has a large number of wrong ends, and only one right one. These adjuncts are all tails, so to speak.... But besides his twenty tails, every man has a head, a center of identity, a soul. And the head of a man is even harder to find than the head of a Skye terrier, for man has nine hundred and nine-nine wrong ends instead of one.

-July 16, 1910, Illustrated London News

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