Life & Wisdom Quote by Sharon Olds

Olds sketches a simple logistics problem that turns out to be a moral one: suffering isn’t just experienced, it’s distributed. In the “one village” frame, horror feels total, omnipresent, almost cosmically unfair. But the second sentence swivels the camera outward and reveals how much of that extremity is produced by perspective and limited bandwidth. If you only hear one village’s stories, those stories colonize your emotional map; they become “the world.” The quiet sting is that reality doesn’t get kinder when you widen the lens. It gets more crowded.

The intent isn’t to relativize pain so much as to expose how attention functions as a kind of power. Olds, who often writes with an unsentimental clarity about the body, family, and violence, understands that horror accrues in the mind the way gossip does: through channels, through proximity, through who is allowed to speak and who is believed. The quote is also a small rebuke to the idea that our outrage is a reliable measure of the world’s condition. If you’re horrified, it may be because you’ve finally been given access, not because horror has suddenly arrived.

Contextually, it reads like a pre-internet observation that lands even harder now. Today we can, in theory, hear about every village at once, and the result is less enlightenment than overload: compassion competes with exhaustion, and “extreme” becomes a scrolling baseline. Olds’ subtext is blunt: the world’s suffering has always been simultaneous; what changes is the aperture of our attention, and the stories we can afford to carry.