Invisible Cities

I often think of this passage from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities where Marco Polo is talking to Kublai Khan about how to approach difficult problems:

...the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.