Different and separate realities

Hard as I may try not to think this way, I am continually aware of the many realities that make up "reality." As I am keyboarding this sentence, some woman in Malaysia is giving birth; some guy in Belgium may be falling to his death on a construction project; and a whole lotta people are simply sleeping in Eugene, Oregon.

I'm reading the Star Tribune yesterday--a piece on the OpEd page by Michael Gerson of the Washington Post. He's talking about Joseph Kony, "a barbarian who threatens regional stability in Africa." Here's the lead paragraph:

"WASHINGTON - A friend, the head of a major aid organization, tells of how his workers in eastern Congo a few years ago chanced upon a group of shell-shocked women and children in the bush. A militia had kidnapped a number of families and forced the women to kill their husbands with machetes, under the threat that their sons and daughters would be murdered if they refused. Afterward the women were raped by more than 100 soldiers; the children were spectators at their own, private genocide."

I try to take all of this in as I drink coffee and eat my raisin bran. And I do not wonder in the least why I resonate to the word "absurd" as a way to conceive of human existence. These different realities also explain why my all-time favorite poem is "Musee de Beaux Arts" by Auden; it's on the wall in my office, and it captures the same bizarre juxtaposition of multiple realities:

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; 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.

-- W. H. Auden

I try to be thankful for what I have, and where I am. And all the while, I am keenly aware that other people are in other places and have other realities. And some of those realities are simply so gruesome that one is left feeling quite powerless.