Distress

I met an amazing guy this evening, not quite by appointment, not quite by accident, but almost, as it feels now, by necessity. It's not hard to imagine what a 55yr old man in Berlin might have experienced in his life in this country, and it is very rarely exposed to somebody like me, or us - only in books and in daft melodramatic films (which of course I have enjoyed all my life) and always only in abstract (with distance) and in documentaries of course (distance?) - in documentaries there is still distance. This was rather different- no distance. People cry inside, and you can see them crying. I hope you understand what I mean. I mean, how do we account for what our parents have done when their son tells us so? How do we know anything about what we are capable of........without an idea that takes us beyond the animals?