The Doors of Perception

We live together, we act, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or 'feeling into'. Thus remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even non-existent. The mind is its own place, and the places inhabited by the insane and exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.

Aldous Huxley
The Doors of Perception

Time Vs History

At a time when history still made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop. known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale nut rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life.

Milan Kundera

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Lost Letters

Society

There was death in that place on the hill. I knew it the first day I walked out the screen door and into the backyard. A zinging, binging buzzing whining sound came right at me: 10,000 flies rose straight up into the air at once. All the backyards had these flies-there was this tall green grass and they nested in it, they loved it.

Oh Jesus Christ, I thought, and not a spider within 5 miles!

As I stood there, the 10,000 flies began to come down out of the sky, setting down in the grass, along the fence, the ground, in my hair, on my arms, everywhere. One of the bolder ones bit me.

I cursed, ran out and bought the biggest fly sprayer you ever saw. I fought them for hours, raging we were, the flies and I, and hours later, coughing and sick from breathing the fly killer, I looked around and there were as many flies as ever. I think for each one I killed they got down in the grass and bred two. I gave it up.

Charles Bukowski
The Post Office II, 6 

Bukowski

Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love.

Charles Bukowski
The Post Office, IV, 13