Campfire

Via Mondo Blogo

 

Piotr Kowalski

"Cube 5 A" 

1967

"We are born trapped in our own selfish skins, and we open our eyes to the rings of existence around us. The ring right around us, of lovers and spouses and then kids, is easy to encircle, but that is a form of selfishness, too, since the lovers give us love and the kids extend our lives. A handful of saints "love out to the horizon," circle after circle—but at the cost, almost always, of seeing past the circle near at hand, not really being able to love their intimates. Most of the time, we collapse the circles of compassion, don't look at the ones beyond, in order to give the people we love their proper due; we open our eyes to see the wider circles only when new creatures come in, when we realize that we really sit at the center of a Saturn's worth of circles, stretching out from our little campfire to the wolves who wait outside, and ever outward to the unknowable—toward, I don't know, deep-sea fish that live on lava and then beyond toward all existence, where each parrot and every mosquito is, if we could only see it, an individual."

Adam Gopnik, from "Dog Story," The New Yorker