injustice is not
comparative – wrong is deep, clear
in each private fate
Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.
A bruised child wailing in the street, his small world for the moment utterly black and cruel before him, does not fetch his unhappiness from sophisticated comparisons or irrational envy; nor can any compensations and celestial harmonies supervening later ever expunge or justify that moment’s bitterness.
The pain may be whistled away and forgotten; the mind may be rendered by it only a little harder, a little coarser, a little more secretive and sullen and familiar with unrightable wrong.
But ignoring that pain will not prevent its having existed; it must remain for ever to trouble God’s omniscience and be a part of that hell which the creation too truly involves.
From The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress, published in five volumes from 1905 to 1906, by Spanish-born American philosopher George Santayana.
According to Wikipedia, the work consists of Reason in Common Sense, Reason in Society, Reason in Religion, Reason in Art, and Reason in Science.
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