ABSTRACT
Each of us carries with us, at any one time, a number of realities, and it is through the interlocking of those realities that we come to understand the world around us. Sometimes we consciously limit what we allow to impinge upon us, in order better to handle a particular reality pressing in its urgency. ‘Comprehension’, however, as Hannah Arendt1 indicates, ‘does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt’. It will come only through acknowledging other realities, both those of others and our own.
