on knowing others and the self

I recently read a blog where a friend noticed that she and her boyfriend viewed things differently. They have different ideas about how things should work, and different thought processes, and she wondered if that was something wrong with her relationship.

Almost every day I am stricken with the idea that the people around me live lives that I can never comprehend. Even the people I know best--my mother, Heather, my husband--they all have thoughts I will never know, they will think things I will never get to hear, and they will process things and thoughts in ways I will never understand, in ways that could never make sense to me.

I'm reading a book by Orson Scott Card on characters in fiction, and he argues that characters are the reason we are driven to fiction: immersing oneself in the mind of a character in a book is the closest anyone can come to truly knowing another person. Fiction is as close as it gets to fully knowing and understanding another person's innermost thoughts and feelings and ideas.

I think he's right. I think that's why in a way fiction is very important: it is the one avenue through which we can all practice immersing ourselves in the soul of another. It is the only place we can pretend we really know someone other than ourselves.

So I will say--my husband and I have different thought processes. We filter things differently. There are things I am very into that Carl will probably just never get. And there are things he is very into that I will never get. And he is the one person in the world who knows me best, and I am the one person in the world who knows him best. If even we can't fully understand each other, who can really understand anybody? While it's true we've only been married for three years, the fact remains: even fifty years from now, I will not fully understand everything he's thinking, when he thinks it. And even if I did, I wouldn't know why he was thinking it.

This is part of what makes the Atonement of Jesus Christ so amazing. The Atonement, or At-One-Ment, gives Him insight into our souls that no one else is privy to. While Carl will never fully see things through the lens of my mind, Christ has and does and will. The Gospel of Jesus Christ never ceases to amaze me. The idea that Someone could fully understand me--and not just me, but you and everyone else on this planet--is miraculous and huge in a way that I cannot comprehend.

Anyway. Thoughts?