can we really know another....person?

Is it within the realms of the attainable to attain complete mastery as to the character, the personality, the quirks, the subtleties of nature, the multitude of exacting habits, the little fears and nuances that make up another human being? In a world full of mysteries where knowing oneself is a challenge few can venture to take on, can we presume to know the dark depths within another?

Yet on a regular basis, I have seen people vouching on the essential characteristics that may define a person. Humans are presumptuous by nature, we feel at ease in our element when we are dealing with certainties within ourselves and within others. We becomes constrained, tight-chested, helpless in company of men who seem foreign and different to us. We love familiarity, always 'like' people who we assume to be 'like' ourselves, as if 'our-self' is the best state to be!

Parents think they know their children, that they ought to know the aims, the motives, the thoughts of their children just because they have caused them to be born. Spouses claim they have read the minds of the other by virtue of living under the same roof and leading the same life more or less. Lovers go a step ahead they believe a single look of love reveals all the hidden secrets, the desires, the wishes and the whims of each other. How hollow and false does these statements sound!

For to know another is a huge and impossible task, we may attempt it like so many have done before us, yet there remains always a place where one cannot reach, quite probe to the bottom of that self that makes another person. Conrad trying to decipher the deep and intense recesses in Lord Jim's character, Maugham wanting to fathom Larry Durcell in Razor's Edge, are attempts to hold onto and grasp that ever fleeting essence in the eyes and voice and variations of a person. This does not mean impossible cannot be attempted rather it must be so and with all aplomb that is required for so terrible and mighty a task. For in knowing another, or in attempting to know another, we though perfunctorily glimpse into the infinite abyss that lies within us!