On the Universality of the Human Experience
Promotional note before the essay: A reminder that my short story “Xu Ming’s Second Time Down” is now available! It’s the third in the Retcon series, although like all the stories in that sequence it is also designed to work on its own. If you haven’t already, please check it out! You can purchase it (and the others) as ebooks at My personal web site • Amazon • Amazon UK • Apple • Barnes & Noble • Kobo • Smashwords. If you have already read it, please write and review and/or share it directly with friends! Many, many thanks. Now on with this week’s essay…
Gandhi sneezed.
Hitler sneezed.
Jesus sneezed. Buddha sneezed. Muhammad sneezed.
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all sneezed.
George Washington sneezed.
Thomas Jefferson sneezed.
All of Thomas Jefferson's slaves sneezed.
All of the women who arrived in Colonial Virginia and shortly thereafter died in childbirth sneezed.
Every woman to oppose the women's suffrage movement, whether passionately or casually, whether at her own behest or from fear of her husband's reaction if she didn't, sneezed.
The very best laborer to work at building Chartes Cathedral sneezed. So did the very worst.
Every soldier to fight in the Taiping Rebellion (1850 - 1864) -- one of the deadliest wars in human history, which probably caused more fatal casualties than the First World War and may possibly have caused more than the Second -- sneezed.
So did all the people who managed to avoid fighting. And the bereaved families of those who died.
James Joyce sneezed during the composition of Ulysses. Homer sneezed while singing the Odyssey.
Everyone who has ever read either has also sneezed.
The most famous person whom you, personally, have never heard of, sneezed. The most formerly famous person who is no longer remembered by any living person sneezed.
Every human fictional character ever imagined sneezed. Batman sneezed; King Arthur sneezed; Madame Bovary sneezed; the delivery guy you see for half a second in the mystery, who is never even raised to the level of a red herring, sneezed.
People have sneezed in space. They have sneezed under water, in submarines. They have sneezed right after birth and on their deathbeds.
Clowns sneeze. Statesmen who order genocide sneeze. Jazz players sneeze. Cooks sneeze while cooking. Children who die of starvation sneeze.
Street sweepers sneeze. I'd imagine they sneeze a lot.
The person you love most in the whole world sneezes, as does the person who hates you the most. The child who you bullied, or the one who bullied you, sneezed.
William Henry Harrison, inaugurated as the seventh U.S. president on 4 March 1941, spoke for hours in the cold to prove that, despite his advanced age, he was tough enough to be president. He caught pneumonia. He sneezed. And then he died one month to the day after his inauguration.
P. A. K. Aboagye, Geormbeeyi Adali-Mortty, Ama Ata Aidoo, Kofi Anyidoho, Kofi Awoonor, J. Benibengor Blay, Kwesi Brew, Kwame Dawes, Amu Djoleto, Frank Kobina Parkes and Nii Parkes all sneezed. You may have no idea who those people are; but you know it's true that they sneezed.
Most of human history occurred prior to the Agricultural Revolution; the precise percentage depends on how you count, but it was at least 90%, possibly much more. In that period people lived in small bands as hunters and gatherers. They loved, wept, sang, pondered the nature of existence, fought, told jokes, dreamed, grew frustrated with their children, went hungry, caught their breaths with excitement, and sneezed.
The person who first thought of farming sneezed.
Every woman who has ever had sex with an ordained Catholic priest has sneezed at some point. The woman who posed for the Mona Lisa sneezed. Every woman who outlived every one of her children sneezed. Every woman who passed as a man to fight in a war sneezed. Cleopatra sneezed, as did every one of her servants.
Every single word I have used thus far in this essay was used first by some particular person at some particular time. Some of them may have slowly evolved, so that the previous usage was almost identical; but one of those uses had to be first. And each and every one of those inventors sneezed. (Including the first person every to say the word "sneeze".)
The first person to say "God bless you" after someone else sneezed, had themselves sneezed.
For a lot of people it is easier to say whether or not they sneezed than whether or not they existed. Moses may or may not have existed; but we know he sneezed. The same with Theseus.
However many people had a hand in writing the Bible, we know for a fact that each and every one of them sneezed.
The people whom we call the Sentinelese people -- we don't know what they call themselves -- live on what we call North Sentinel Island, which is one of the Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal. They have never had any contact with any outside people, for at least the last several thousand years; they resist such contact violently, and have been let alone. They are thought to have lived on their island for 60,000 years. They presumably know nothing of any culture apart from their own. Wikipedia, from which I have drawn all the information in the prior few sentences, describes them as "the most isolated people in the world".1 Any time that someone uses the phrase "everyone", think about whether it includes the Sentinelese people (bearing in mind that we know almost nothing about them, save for the fact of their isolation and their commitment to maintaining it). If you say that the Agricultural Revolution affected everyone, or that colonialism or industrialism or the Second World War affected everyone, you're omitting the Sentinelese. (Climate change, however, will affect everyone.) Virginia Woolf wasn't including them when she said that human nature changed "on or about December, 1910". The last time someone said that "everyone knows what McDonald's is", they were omitting the Sentinelese.
The Sentinelese sneeze.
Prior to December, 1910, people sneezed. They continued to sneeze during December, 1910, and have also sneezed every month since.
For "sneezed" read "yawned". Read "blinked". But you can't quite read "dreamed", "laughed", "sighed", "hoped", "feared" and "wondered", since while people who died in infancy sneezed, yawned and blinked, they may not have gotten so far as to dream or laugh or fear. So do not read just anything; most certainly, for instance, do not read "read".
Everyone who has ever sneezed knows (in one particular sense, but a very important sense) what it is like to sneeze.
Unless the world is destroyed in an instant, by an asteroid, nuclear holocaust or the Large Hadron Collider, someone will be the last person ever to live on Earth. They probably won't know it. They might only outlast others by microseconds. It is quite probable that no one will ever know who they are. But we do know that they will have, at some point, sneezed.
I sneezed between the time I began this essay and the time I finished it.
And you, Noble Reader, whomever you are, have sneezed, and will soon do so again.
Or at any rate that’s what I copied down when I wrote the first draft of this essay several years ago. The wording has changed since, and I can’t find it in the relevant history pages. But someone said it and it ‘tweren’t me.