Currently listening to a special CD edition of actor Michael York sensitively reading aloud the entire text of Alan Lightman’s brilliant novella Einstein’s Dreams. Here is the way Part 1 ends:
“The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or of joy, The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.”
Strikes me as one of the truest things ever said about individuals’ life-experience, consciousness, and basic alienation.