Sonder

There is a word I came across relatively recently: sonder.

It describes the sudden realisation that every person we pass is living a life as vivid and complicated as our own. I have been thinking about it while watching a scene from Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders’ film that I first saw nearly forty years ago. I loved it then, although I am not sure I understood why. I was probably too young. I understood the melancholy, perhaps, and the beauty. I did not yet have enough life behind me to understand what it was actually saying.

Now perhaps I do better.

That we spend so much of our lives trapped inside our own gaze. The people passing us in the street become scenery: the woman at the bus stop, the man driving badly in front of us, the bored cashier, the teenager staring at a telephone, the old couple arguing quietly over coffee. We see expressions and make judgements. Angry. Friendly. Arrogant. Beautiful. Ugly. Threatening. Sad. Foreign.

But every one of them is standing at the centre of another world. They have mothers and fathers. People they have lost. Somebody they once loved desperately and perhaps still do. They have embarrassing memories from when they were fourteen. They have bills they cannot pay, bodies that frighten them, children they worry about, mornings when they cannot get out of bed. They have songs that transport them instantly somewhere else. They have known tenderness, boredom, sex, rejection, illness, ridiculousness, triumph. And almost none of it is visible.

Perhaps that is what moves me so much now in Wings of Desire. Its angels listen to the interior lives of strangers. The city that from a distance looks like buildings, roads and crowds is revealed to contain millions of private worlds.

Occasionally we realise that we are inside the picture too. The stranger walking towards me is not merely passing through my life. I am passing through theirs.

There is something profoundly humbling about that. But, strangely, I don’t find it depressing. Quite the opposite. At 58, despair no longer seems like evidence that something has gone terribly wrong. Nor does grief. Nor loneliness. Nor fear. They are colours in the same picture as love, pleasure, sunlight, friendship, stupidity, desire and laughter.

Noticing that everybody else is carrying the same extraordinary burden, an entire life, invisible to almost everyone around them, does not make the world smaller. It makes it enormous. And, for reasons I cannot entirely explain, it gives me faith.