There is a passage from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities that I copied into my notebook and saved when I was a teenager. I have returned to it often over the years, especially when driving through cities and towns: “A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!” This may at first seem a depressing image, pointing as it does to our existential aloneness even among those closest to us. But I hear in it as well the possibility of empathy and caring. That each one of us is “a profound secret and mystery to every other” means that we have something essential in common! Please know tha...