Dear Benjamin,
Thank you so much for your greetings, which I just saw...Have read your piece in the Open with - what can I say, gratefulness and a heavy heart.
There is a saying, that some people are born a little bit sad and some people are born a little bit happy. Maybe it is with feeling as it is with eyesight that sunlight that is too bright can blind us and that sorrow is more clearly seen when the disposition is slightly overcast.
I did ruin XYZ's email; it was short and poignant, my "introduction" was too long and strident but those feelings are at least on the same side of the divide.
Of course we cannot truly feel XYZ's "sadness" about the country she loves, nor the "heavy heart" of the author above, nor the pain of Dr. Wang Yi and his wife, a pain over the Cultural Revolution that is so deep that thirty years later husband and wife cannot talk about it.
But to acknowledge that one cannot truly feel what another feels is to make too technical a point. Human similarities are by a magnitude of a thousand more significant than the differences, and that is so too when the feelings are downcast and one is used to looking down when walking anyway. I am Benjamin Harris.
