Millions of individual minds flock to great cities to be in the thick of it. Maybe to be close to others. Maybe to be close to great business. Maybe to be close to great culture and subculture.
Millions of individual minds flock to London yet Populus polls illuminate a hidden darkness in the bright lights of the capital: do a quarter of London-dwellers really feel alone?
Dickens describes the secrets of individual minds in A Tale of Two Cities. It feels as though Dickens celebrates the hidden depths of each individual while echoing a tragic yearning for human connectedness.
"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!"
Charles Dickens
It feels unusual to acknowledge just how unfathomable and opaque we might be, even to our closest ones. To admit we are all natural introverts with the very best of our thoughts destined to remain privy to ourself. Only the highlights shared and only the headlines understood. What a wonderful fact to reflect on Dickens.
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