Grain of Sand

It’s said the suffering and death of the few elicits more sympathy than that of the many. I wonder if this is truer of an individualistic culture like America’s than of many other cultures. 

In early June 2023, a fishing boat carrying migrants from Libya to Italy capsized off the coast of Greece. At least eighty people were known dead and five hundred were missing and presumed dead. A week later, five passengers died in the implosion of a submersible on a mission to examine the remains of the Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The latter captured the attention of millions, the former less so. 

The submersible passengers were wealthy; the refugees were poor. The submersible’s implosion was linked to the Titanic, which still captures our imaginations a hundred-plus years after it sank, while the death of the six hundred was one more story of desperate refugees fleeing war and poverty. Also, the fate of the five was unknown at first, fueling suspense, while the fate of the eighty, at least, in the fishing boat was quickly known, lacking suspense. These facts complicate the picture, but I think the few-versus-many rule still holds up to scrutiny in these paired events. 

Best to drop them as the starting point for a blog post on grief, I concluded. The next day, the words of William Blake came back to me: 

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour

I’ve always thought these lines beautifully expressed a way of living that few of us can achieve, or sustain for more than a brief visionary moment. Thinking of them this time, though, I wondered if Blake was making a different observation: We can ‘see’ the world, heaven, infinity, and eternity only in something infinitely smaller and more intimate than them. 

There’s more to Auguries of Innocence, the poem that starts with those four lines. There is outrage at cruelty and power abused: 

He who shall hurt the little wren  

Shall never be beloved by men

and 

The Harlot’s cry from street to street

Shall weave old England’s winding sheet

*******

In September 2015, a two-year old Syrian boy was found lying face down on a beach near the resort town of Bodrum, Turkey. He was among at least a dozen refugees dead after fleeing Syria by boat. The photo of the little boy with his back to a world that turned away from him, bowing to the Ocean god that took his life, shamed the world, briefly. 

Should we move beyond our hearts going out to a two-year-old boy? Is there a higher perch for humanity from which we don’t need to see the death of an innocent to be outraged and shamed but can act justly for the many as well as the few? 

I think we need to do both—return to Blake to see the large in the small and from there, reverse directions and learn to see a grain of sand in the world, a wildflower in the expanse of heaven, the hand holding a tiny object hidden in infinity, and an hour in the endless hours of eternity. This would be a cause for celebration, and of grief for the few and the many when tragedy or evil tears them away.