In high school, I spray-painted a T-shirt to read, “We live as we dream — alone.”
With all the profundity I could muster at age 16, I felt like if I put Joseph Conrad’s most famous quote somewhere close by — across my chest, I guess — it would feel less insurmountable.
“It is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence — that which makes its truth, its meaning — its subtle and penetrating essence,” Conrad writes in Heart of Darkness. “It is impossible. We live, as we dream — alone.”
I would like to think that the past few years have enlightened me to the injustice of having a thought as complex as Conrad’s bastardized into a six-word phrase on a shirt. But that is not to say the idea is any further from my mind now than it was then. Much of the reason why I have devoted my time to writing and this newspaper has to do with Conrad’s claim.
I am haunted by Conrad’s idea that there is something — a most important and profound something — happening inside of each of our heads that we can’t quite get into other people’s heads, the “subtle and penetrating essence” of our moments, our days and our lives.
I can’t say definitively what I think this essence is. The closest I can come to this is to say it is whatever makes a person more than a trillion molecules. It’s what would be lost if all that made up a person was skin and sinews and a brain and perfectly constructed organs connected by blood-pumping tubes.
The fact that I cannot define what it means to be human isn’t so much what bothers me. It’s that I don’t think I will ever be able to; that being human is probably different for everyone and is a sense so primal and ever-present that we have never been without it. Because we have never been without our particular life sensation, we cannot see around it and we cannot explain it. It’s that we could never give a thorough enough explication of all of the shades of feeling we have ever experienced, so that another person could fully understand the very individual and precise lens with which we all view a very shared world: a sad juxtaposition.
It is the desire to convey my “life sensation” that drives me to write. I write because you write what you cannot say. Explaining the significance of seeing someone in exactly such a light at exactly such a time would require a degree of precision I could not capture in conversation. Writing is sharp. Like people, there is an element to text beyond the way its letters connect. It is a glimpse into a world defined by parameters I can construct, a piece of my consciousness that I can try to fit into your consciousness for a captured moment. Reading is the transferring of experience.
I write because I want you to know exactly how it feels to sleep on a borrowed pillow on the floor of an empty apartment with new brown carpet. I want you to know it precisely. I want to encapsulate you between the blocks of this text, bringing these particular moments of our existences a little closer to one another. Your response to the experience will be different from mine, but at least you will see what I see.
My love for newspapers stems from a similar place. One of the premises of newspapers, I think, is that the world contains certain happenings that are pertinent to everyone, things everyone in a community ought to know. I like that idea.
As an editor, one of the most important things I do is make sure that what we print is precise. Sometimes that’s a mundane task that comes down to making sure sentence clauses end up in the right order and that titles are complete. But news is always multifaceted. One of the keys to accurate and effective reporting is to ensure that text is always precise — being certain that the scope of a claim is not too broad, being careful not to conflate correlation and causation and drawing distinctions between conflicting and confusing reports.
I write because I am a narcissist and want to believe that the most profound experiences of my life will not disappear entirely when I do. I write because if I don’t, my own experiences might begin to feel foreign even to myself, like they belong to someone who would proudly wear a spray-painted T-shirt with a quote robbed of its context. I want to convince myself Conrad was wrong. I want to believe that though we might dream alone, we do not always live that way.
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To Sarah Burns-
To further make your point, I have been a juror a number of times and watched lawyers carefully and skillfully attempt to convince us that each one of them were telling the truth, and that the same evidence meant different things, and how their client was not lying, and then on cross-examination, lawyers and experts would come in to discredit one another, while the the true victim in the case, either the accused or the accuser, is the loneliest person on the planet. Then we, the jurors, go into deliberation and if we are still not absolutely sure who has told the truth, each one of us wrestles with our individual conscience, alone.
Conrad was wrong. We don’t live alone. While it is not as precise as the written word, we all need to use the spoken word so that we are connected to people.
You and Conrad are both right. Well thought out ideas and descriptions are best written down. Sometimes the way you look or the way you talk will turn off a person to a genius idea. On the other hand, a well told joke will make everyone in the room laugh, a well told eulogy will make every one in the room feel more deeply. I don’t want to read what politician has to say, I want to see and hear him or her debate the opposition, and to have a moderator speak up when their is a question of fact or procedure.
On the other hand, I slept outside in the jungles of Vietnam for over a year, sweating until four in the morning, with bugs, mosquitoes, and flies all over the place, rodents eating out of my dry rations, with inflamed bites and rashes, half asleep while smelling and listening for anything for anything that might kill us in the total darkness of a moonless night. I wore clothes with blood all over them for weeks without resupplies. I saw young men on both sides die in horrible ways, in which I was a contributor. I witnessed torture on a number of occasions. I carry the rage of having incompetent people in positions of authority that were getting us killed. I watched blacks and whites and browns unselfishly protect each other with their lives, and then beat the crape out of each other in the rear over some ignorant racial slight. And I never saw one sample of this all loving, all forgiving, all merciful God. It was chaos, and no one intervened.
The point is, in writing this short paragraph above, I am not alone in this experience. On the other hand, if I could tell you my stories in person, I could also make you laugh because I love to interject a little humor in everything. But not knowing me personally, it would be inappropriate to inject this story with any humor.
Word.
Humans are social animals and love to communicate with each other. Writing is just an efficient way of communicating with more people over greater distances and across centuries. Writing down an idea freezes it in time and space, and allows you to examine it in detail from all angles. You may decide to modify that idea, or you may decide it’s not a good idea at all. As an editor at a student-run paper you must let the reporters put their own spin on their stories, and not make them write from your point of view. You seem like a poet at heart, and there are eight million stories in the naked city of Berkeley so you’ll never run out of material to write about.
To Califpenguin-
We love to communicate with each other, even when we are not communicating. In religion and politics you will find many prime examples of people who have made up their minds regardless of any fact injected into a debate. We learn who we are when we are tiny children. Adults implant into our identity that we cannot get into heaven unless we accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior, or that we cannot get into heaven unless with accept Islam, and so forth. We learn how to treat women, homosexuals, and people who do not look like us, from our earliest childhood, by example and repetition. We even learn conflict resolution in our childhood years. Sometimes punching someone in the face is the only way to get your point across. Remember the guy who wrote “Mein Kampf” was a great communicator.
My point is, your reporters must be circumspect, and not put their own spin. Everyone is entitled to be wrong in their opinions, but no one is entitled to be wrong in their facts or leave out relevant facts. It is like a teacher telling the children who the greatest man that ever lived was. No teacher has that right. It is the difference between teaching the Bible as fact or fiction. We have the story of Adam and Eve that is 3500 years old, but we also have found human bones in Africa that are over one million years old. Therefore, the Bible’s version of this creation is questionable at best.
To peepsqueek –
I totally agree that reporters should simply report facts and events. However, we both know in the real world that’s not what happens. Editors have certain biases and so do reporters. Investigative journalists with something to prove will track down sources to support their stories while only giving token references to dissenting voices. Since the DC is a student-run newspaper, the college-level writers should learn how to present their stories while remaining honest and cross-checking facts. This is the kind of “spin” practiced by professional journalists so students may as well learn what happens in the real world.
By that reasoning, we might as well skip college altogether and just hit the real world. Eh.