A stranger's story is vital in the chain of life
All the people we notice, and all those we never even see or think about, have stories that are vital to someone else. Credit: AP/Charlie Riedel
The train sped quietly through the Spanish countryside. It was early morning, and the farmland around us was just beginning to stir. The sun had found a foothold and was about to breach the horizon, its first rays creeping across the land to the left of the tracks. But the land to the right was still dark.
It was there that a solitary truck was making its way along a dusky road between two farm plots. Neither large nor small and lacking any markings on its silvery body, it seemed the type of vehicle that might be used to ferry produce to market. I could barely make out the profile of the driver, but I imagined that one of those fertile planting grounds might be his. I began to think about his story, his life, his work, his play, his day, his week, his year. It was all unknowable to me, every bit of it, but I knew it was part of at least one of the multitude of interconnected cycles that comprise life on Earth.
Then again, he might not have been a farmworker. He might have been a delivery truck driver, or a charity worker picking up goods for donations. He might have been an employee at some sort of factory company that made or required parts that needed to be picked up or dropped off. He might have borrowed the truck from a friend to move his family from the country to Madrid, the Spanish capital from whence the train had come.
Many of us engage in this kind of filling-in-the-biographical-blanks of the people we see. The many cafes in the many plazas of Spain are natural fonts for this exercise. You see a stranger, you conjure their story. Simon and Garfunkel called it "playing games with the faces." Their bus travelers supposed that the man in the gabardine suit was a spy whose bow tie was really a camera.
It's a healthy exercise in the sense that using one's imagination is almost always a plus. But it's also important that we recognize that regardless of the life details we invent, the actual backstories of all of these people are vitally important to all of us.
The novelist Salman Rushdie coined a marvelous phrase that speaks to this. "To understand just one life you have to swallow the world," he wrote.
The line gets at the perspective we must have as humans who depend on one another for our existence. But it seems to me that the converse also is true. To understand the world, we need to understand the singular lives in it. Our human tapestry depends on each of its many threads.
The history of our species is that we become more interconnected as time goes. Amid the blustering and bellicosity and spasms of national fervor that can seem to characterize life on our planet these days, we need to make sure that this process of steadily deepening ties continues. Understanding the tendrils that bind us, no matter their length, is essential. Understanding fosters respect, and respect brings tolerance and compassion.
These qualities are essential for our survival and prosperousness as a species. All the people we notice from our vantage on a passing train or at a cafe table — and all those we never even see or think about — have stories that are vital to someone else, whose own stories are vital to yet others, and eventually the chain of life reaches us.
I don't know how many links are in the chain between me and the man driving that silver truck in rural Spain, but I'm certain that the chain remains sound.
Columnist Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
