We’re Alone, But Strangely Connected To One Another

Existentialism is the concept that we live in a universe that is indifferent to our happiness and general welfare, that we are free to make our own choices, and that we are, in fact, defined by the totality of those choices.  Some say that’s a gloomy proposition because it implies that we must act in the complete absence of any leadership or guidelines, but I prefer to view it in the opposite fashion: wouldn’t you rather be the captain of your ship than one of the deck-hands?

In any case, I bring this up as it’s the 113th birthday of the 20th Century American poet e. e. cummings, whose works often presented this notion of existentialism.  Here’s my very favorite, in which the protagonist makes a choice that other people hadn’t; it ends with a line about his aloneless and about his unforeseen act of compassion that, I hope, will send chills up your spine.

It’s another reminder that we’re connected to one another in strange and beautiful ways.  If our civilization survives through this watershed moment in its history and finds a path to a sustainable future, its success will be due to this precise fact.

a man who had fallen among thieves
a man who had fallen among thieves
lay by the roadside on his back
dressed in fifteenth-rate ideas
wearing a round jeer for a hat

fate per a somewhat more than less
emancipated evening
had in return for consciousness
endowed him with a changeless grin

whereon a dozen staunch and leal
citizens did graze at pause
then fired by hypercivic zeal
sought newer pastures or because

swaddled with a frozen brook
of pinkest vomit out of eyes
which noticed nobody he looked
as if he did not care to rise

one hand did nothing on the vest
its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt
while the mute trouserfly confessed
a button solemnly inert.

Brushing from whom the stiffened puke
i put him all into my arms
and staggered banged with terror through
a million billion trillion stars