Complex Creatures, Humans....

Photo source.

A juxtaposition of quotations, stemming from a train of thought from yesterday (Bold emphasis in the quotation below is mine).

"Even when the effect of some gene is indubitable, the sheer complexity of the self will mean that it will not serve as an oracle on what the person will do. The gene that lets me taste propyl­thiouracil ... might make me dislike tonic water, coffee and dark beer. Unlike the tenuous genes linked to personality or intelligence, this one codes for a single taste-bud receptor, and I don’t doubt that it lets me taste the bitterness. So why hasn’t it stopped me from enjoying those drinks? Presumably it’s because adults get a sophisticated pleasure from administering controlled doses of aversive stimuli to themselves. I’ve acquired a taste for Beck’s Dark; others enjoy saunas, rock-climbing, thrillers or dissonant music. Similarly, why don’t I conform to type and exploit those fast-twitch muscle fibers (thanks, ACTN3 genes!) in squash or basketball, rather than wasting them on hiking? A lack of coordination, a love of the outdoors, an inclination to daydream, all of the above? The self is a byzantine bureaucracy, and no gene can push the buttons of behavior by itself. You can attribute the ability to defy our genotypes to free will, whatever that means, but you can also attribute it to the fact that in a hundred-trillion-synapse human brain, any single influence can be outweighed by the product of all of the others." --Steven Pinker in the New York Times, found via The Useless Tree.

And on knowing each other, the "Grizzled-but-still-incorrigible-scribe-himself!" says it so well. From the comments on yesterday's post:

"I don't honestly think anyone ever truly knows another person. Maybe we don't ever know ourselves, either. It doesn't matter how much you love someone, or respect them, or how hard you try and share your world—yourself—with them. It just isn't possible. We all play off one another. That is sometimes apparent here in the blog world. And it's not that we're even being false (although some doubtless are) so much as we tend to present that part and side of us that we think others expect or want. We do that with everyone in our life, every day.

Intimacy in the sexual sense often tells us little about each other—or only within a limited range. Intimacy in the broader sense—friendships that last and perhaps grow over decades, including that between husband and wife, significant others, whatever applies—come closer, but still miss or misinterpret as much as they comprehend. Two soldiers, faced daily with the raw bloody edge of war—firefights, sudden death, and horrors unimaginable—learn things about one and other no one in civilian life can ever know and understand.

...No blog will ever replace the act of sharing the same space—cafe table, church pew, bed, living room, campfire on a northcountry beach—but it provides a forum in which we can, to a certain degree, begin."

And also from yesterdays comment thread, the illustrious K. from Calgary quotes to us from Dickens Tale of Two Cities. In my view, Dickens nails it here:

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!"

From Whiskey River:
"Even when the poet seems most himself, he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete." ~William Butler Yeats