W. H. Auden was a poet. He was born in
In that poem, he asks us to see “how everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may/ Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,/ But for him it was not an important failure;…/…and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen/ Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,/ had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on” (published in Another Time, 1940).
In other words, Auden asks us to see that other people do not care about Icarus. They do not care even if he dies. Indifference is one word for this lack of caring. What do we think about this indifference, this lack of caring, toward the suffering of others? Is it normal? Is it good? Is it true of us? Should it be?
Copyright © 2012 by Steven Farsaci. All rights reserved. Fair use encouraged.