The lights and shadows of consciousness

As George Eliot observed, it is a watershed moment when we realise that other people have “an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference”1. In a sense, these other “centres of self” will always elude us. Other people may tell us what they are feeling, and we may try to empathise, but we can never fully project our own perspective into theirs, or theirs into ours.