Walls, Fences, Neighbors

I just finished reading a book, “Travels with Herodotus” by Ryszard Kapuscinski, that will soon be added to my recommended reading list. Its a non-fiction book in which he relates tales of some his travels as a reporter while also reading and commenting on “The Histories” by Herodotus. I’m not going to get into the whole book here, but there was a chapter, early on in which he talks about his travels to China in the late 1950’s/early 1960’s and his experiences and thoughts on the Great Wall.

“The very first reflex in the face of potential trouble was to build a wall. To shut oneself in, fence oneself off. Because whatever comes from without, from over there, can only be a threat, an omen of misfortune, a harbinger of evil_….And the wall is not merely motivated by exterior considerations. Protecting against foreign menaces, it also allows one to control what is happening internally. There are passages in the walls, doors and gates, and guarding them, of course, one could control who entered and exited. One could question, one could check for valid papers, one could take down names, look at faces, observe, commit to memory. And thus such a wall is simultaneously a shield and a trap, a veil and a cage.”

That and the passages around it struck me. Humans have been building walls for millennium, to keep others out, but if they are tall enough, they can be used to keep people in. Take prisons, those are distinct instance in which walls are used to keep people in, to watch and observe. At what point does one switch, though, from keeping others out, to keep others in? When does the differentiation happen?

Maybe it never does, and it most likely won’t for most people. We build fences and walls for privacy, to keep wildlife out. But on a larger scale, when we have governments building walls, wherever they may be, to keep a certain population out, those same walls can easily be used to prevent those being protected from escaping themselves. Yes, highly theoretical, but I sense that there are certain governments out there who have thought this through in advance and have distinct plans for both keeping people out as well as keeping people in.

But what if we look to ourselves? Many times we build walls around ourselves to keep others from hurting us, to prevent harm to our psyche and our general well being. But what if at the same time we are keeping too much in, forgoing a fuller experience and joy in life because we are on the guard and built walls around us. Walls, thus, can be a double edged sword, both beneficial and harmful at the same time. Maybe our own personal walls shouldn’t be build so high, maybe we should disassemble them a little and expose ourselves a little more to the world around us, let a little more in. Its not all good, but we have the ability to choose what we let in, we don’t have to block it all and thus starve ourselves in the process.

Robert Frost once said in a poem that “Good fences make good neighbors”. Well, maybe they can make good neighbors, but probably not if they are so tall that we can’t even meet or see our neighbors. A low fence, a low wall, allowing for travel across it, is a much better kind of wall, simply for delineation and not protection so much. Yet too often, we disregard our humanity, our neighbors and their needs, and build our walls both externally and internally as tall as possible, to offer the greatest protection possible. Its a fallacy; we need to take them down, to be open to dialogue and conversation and the raw emotions that come with it.