Walking the Wall

While I generally get drawn to small quotes that seem to highlight a
specific thought, I think this passage is well worth reading in whole.
This is from Neil Gaimen’s book, American Gods, p252-253:
 

   
No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were
not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies. We
are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an
island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the
repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change:
there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or
another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own
experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other
life. Lives are snowflakes–forming patterns we have seen before, as
like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in
a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There’s not a chance you’d
mistake one for another, after a minute’s close inspection), but still
unique.
    Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand
dead, a hundred thousand dead, “casualties may rise to a million.” With
individual stories, the statistics become people–but even that is a
lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are
numbing and meaningless…

The allusion to John Donne’s often quoted, “No man is an island” refers to part of his Meditation XVII where he writes:

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one
man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into
a better language; and every chapter must be so translated…As
therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher
only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but
how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness….No
man is an island, entire of itself…any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for
whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

In
American
Gods, the old gods that people who migrated to America brought with
them from all over the world are dying–people don’t remember them
anymore, don’t worship them, and so they are moving to the realm of
the forgotten. The “new” gods springing up in America are technical and
cold, those of the internet, television, credit cards, and more. In an
age of communication when we should be moving towards complete
connection with those around and reflect Donne’s words–we are in fact,
islands unto ourselves. We have so much information, so many stories
and pictures and faces of dying children, war torn streets, famine,
bombs, tsunami disasters, and on and on and on–inundated with the
horrors of other people’s lives in full color, full sound, nothing
missing but the smells…we retreat into ourselves and disconnect from
the world around us.

Further on, Gaimen writes:

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain
upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a
smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our
souls without real pain. Fiction allows us to slide into these other
heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in
the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and
in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we
resume our lives. A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.

Not
only fiction, but movies, and video games, and computer games, and any
other way to deal with our fears in a safe way, we can live the pain,
but then we can shut the book, stop the DVD, turn off the console box
or PC and walk away. I continually find it the greatest (and most sad)
irony that in an age of virtually limitless connection–we walk alone.