No Two Persons

by Erica Bauermeister

Wandering is a gift given only to the lost. Nine simple words, but they wrapped

Their communication like neon signs with most of the letters burnt out. What got filled in was only what made sense to you. What fit the story you already knew, the story you needed, whether or not it was any good for you.

Science heard that fragment of a second and wondered how to make it fit into a whole. Fiction wondered what hearing it felt like.

Ignoring the fact that grief is not a stalker but a stowaway, always there and up for any journey.

A child could make you love bone-deep, make you try to see further into another person than you ever thought possible, to understand who they were, what they needed, wanted. But with that astonishing depth of love came the realization that no one was doing the same for you. And that could make you lonely.

Wanting him to understand the gift that grew out of his brokenness. To see that he had been given not just a hell to live in, but the road out.

A half-life that would take twice as long to live.

wandering.

epigraph that begins No Two Persons is generally attributed to Edmund Wilson (1895–1972), a well-known American literary critic. You can find “no two persons ever read the same book” credited to Wilson on blogs, stickers, frameable artwork, and Twitter, along with pages and pages of Google links. Because I was curious, I tried to find the original source. I could not. In an introduction to The Triple Thinkers in 1938, Wilson did write the thought-provoking statement: “In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.” This comes close, but both of those scenarios are different—one talking about the difference in interpretation between author and reader, and the other referring to the same reader encountering the same book multiple times. Not to mention that it’s not the actual quote.

You can find the words “No two persons ever read the same book, or saw the same picture” in The Writings of Madame Swetchine. Madame Swetchine (1782–1857) was a well-educated Russian woman who spoke several languages and spent much of her growing-up years at the court of Catherine the Great. In

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