Everybody Suffers
March 27, 2005
One of my English teachers in high school once said that a sign of a great mind, a great person, is the ability to look past the particulars of your own experience and see the general principles that apply to everyone. Say you’re disappointed in love: You see it in general terms. You’re not the only person to whom it has happened. What makes us human, in the larger sense, is our ability to see past the particulars to detect the universal drives underneath them.