By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

It may be that consciousness evolved to sieve the relevant from the incomprehensible allness of all there is, to parse the world into concepts and find an organizing principle for the chaos of them. Our cognitive inheritance is a restless yearning to fathom how things cohere and where they belong, a yearning we have given shape to in laws and labels, weights and balances, hierarchies and categories. It has served us well, this instinct to categorize in order to contain, giving us music, the laws of planetary motion, and democracy. But it also pulsates beneath every ism we have ever invented, beneath every stereotype and every genocide, beneath every algorithm that reduces us to variables then adds them up to sell the sum of who we are, beneath all the parcels of preconception we trade daily and mistake the barter a for a genuine encounter with one another.

Two centuries ago, Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804–May 19, 1864) offered a pithy, powerful antidote to this double-edged instinct.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

In a notebook entry from the autumn of 1836, penned shortly after his moving meditation on how not to waste your life, Hawthorne proposes a revision of our standard classification system for humanity — one that would rehumanize us with the simple awareness that what binds us is infinitely stronger than what divides us or by what affiliations we divide ourselves. He writes:

A new classification of society is to be instituted. Instead of rich and poor, high and low, they are to be classed, — First, by their sorrows: for instance, whenever there are any, whether in fair mansion or hovel, who are mourning the loss of relations and friends, and who wear black, whether the cloth be coarse or superfine, they are to make one class. Secondly, all who have the same maladies, whether they lie under damask canopies or on straw pallets or in the wards of hospitals, they are to form one class. Thirdly, all who are guilty of the same sins, whether the world knows them or not; whether they languish in prison, looking forward to the gallows, or walk honored among men, they also form a class. Then proceed to generalize and classify the whole world together, as none can claim utter exemption from either sorrow, sin, or disease; and if they could, yet Death, like a great parent, comes and sweeps all through one darksome portal, — all his children.

What a magnificent way to remember that down where the spirit meets the bone, we are all facing the same struggle: to feel safe, to feel seen, to wrest some meaning and some marvel from the ephemeral bewilderment of being alive.