How strange it is to be here
I came across the phrase “man’s utter strangeness” while reading Hannah Arendt’s “Love and Saint Augustine”, a book that is comfortably above my intellectual pay grade. The book explores Augustine’s account of love: love as a way that we reach beyond ourselves. I will not pretend that I understood the whole thing. But that phrase stopped me.
Man’s Utter Strangeness
I put my iPad down for a moment.
Because it is strange, isn’t it? That we are here at all. That we wake up inside bodies that need feeding, washing and sleep. That we get dressed, commute to work, make small talk, answer emails, fall in love, get paid, get sick, book holidays, worry about our futures, and somehow treat the whole arrangement as normal.
Most of the time life does feel normal. It carries us along. There are rosters to check, groceries to buy, messages to reply to, plans to make. But every now and then, the ordinary world seems to tilt slightly. You look at it all and think: what exactly is this?
In medicine, this strangeness is accentuated. A person presents to the hospital because something in the body has declared itself. A duct is blocked, a rhythm has gone wonky, a scan shows something that was not meant to be there. And suddenly, the life that felt so stable is now dependent on numbers, images, tubes, signatures, conversations in corridors and decisions made by tired people under fluorescent light.
There is something deeply strange about being human. We live as though we are plans and personalities and careers and relationships, and we are. But we are also sodium levels, haemoglobin, bile ducts, platelets, creatinine, oxygen saturation. We are storied carried around in bodies.
Human beings are strange because we are more than what we physically are. We seem to also be reaching beyond ourselves. We want love, success, rest, recognition and beauty and at least some assurance that all of this is not random.
We seem to be finite creatures with seemingly infinite appetite.
Perhaps that is what makes us so strange. We are fragile bodies with vast interior lives. We are blood tests and memories. We are rosters and longings. We are professional titles, private fears, childhood wounds, favourite songs, unfinished ambitions, and quiet prayers.
Man’s utter strangeness.
Perhaps the phrase stayed with me because it points out that the ordinary is not actually ordinary. The person next to us is not merely a colleague or a family member, but another bewildering creature trying to live inside the same mystery.
We can’t be astonished all the time. Most of the time our life has to feel normal. But occasionally phrases, or moments can stop us, it almost snaps us out of our day to day life. What a strange phenomenon.
How strange it is to be here. How strange it is to be alive.
More to explore
Hannah Arendt’s Doctoral Thesis 1929:
Love and Saint Augustine
Man’s utter strangeness Spotify Playlist
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