Wednesday, March 9, 2011

icebergs

"No man," scribed the priest, squinting his tired his eyes in the candlelight, "is an iland, intire of it selfe." The flame flicked and shadows danced across the parchment. He stopped and creaked backwards, surveying the empty room and running a hand across his beard. He was of course, alone, and the words that still hung black and wet before him rang like the bells of St Paul's in the silence. "No man an island," whispered he to himself. "Connected, together, not... alone." Quietly, he sank the quill into a small pot of ink and returned to his work.

It's been almost four hundred years. I've often wondered just what prompted John Donne to write that. No man is an island. As a scholar and a minister, he would certainly have been familiar with First Corinithians - the interconnectedness of the body of Christ, the many parts as one, the outworking of being together. He went on to write about how if one man dies it affects him, just as if a part of Europe were "washed away by the sea" and how he is inextricably "involved in mankinde." It's hard to believe that this was a new thought for Donne. Rather, I get the impression that essentially, through the poetry of seventeenth century English, he's simply reassuring himself.

For me, living in twenty-first century Britain, I think I understand a little of what he means. He is right - we are all connected, and one man's action impacts another man's life in ways Donne could never have imagined. For me though, I'd say we're much more like icebergs.

Hear me out: I'm not trying to be clever. I just think that in lots of ways, as individuals we float along, drifting and bumping and splitting off and floating by, all the while with a whole other story going on under the water.

Recently, a number of couples I know have been in a lot of trouble. One man appears to be on the brink of a breakdown and walked out on his wife. Another is trying hard for things not to be so awkward with the family he left for another woman. Meanwhile, a lady I know is trying as hard as she can to be dignified and gracious on Facebook while her separated husband is being astonishingly indiscreet and vile. These are all things that happen - and it occurs to me that there's a lot of chilly behaviour from a lot of floating people out there.

As for me, I often feel that drifting sensation. At work, I bash into people. Sometimes at church, I accidentally say the wrong thing, and often I have the wrong thing said to me. Ice chunks splinter off, and water refreezes, and on we go. Then there are other times altogether, when it genuinely feels like I'm floating alone in open water.

"Connected together," he must have wondered. Why does it not always feel like that? Perhaps the answer is because we actually know that we should be. Maybe Donne got it right after all, maybe there is some deep inner idea hardwired in us that we must... belong, regardless of what we do on the surface, or what happens in the 9/10ths of our hidden lives. What I do, whether it's buying fair-trade coffee or smashing into you like the Titanic, will definitely have an impact.

I guess we all ought to remember that, whatever ocean we're floating in.