— Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Chapter 33
About this quote
हिन्दी में
आदमी आपस में बड़े ही निर्दयी हो सकते हैं।
What it means
Two ordinary words carry the weight. Human beings — not those men, not that crowd; Huck files the cruelty under the species he belongs to, which means the sentence includes him. And can be states a capacity rather than an event, so it is not a report on what happened but on what is available to anyone standing in that street.
It is worth keeping for its register. The most serious moral judgement in the book arrives in flat, uneducated speech with no rhetoric in it whatsoever — an untaught boy reaching a conclusion none of the respectable characters around him ever reach, and saying it the way you would remark on the weather.
What it teaches you
Watch your own reaction when someone you dislike gets what you think they had coming — the useful data is not whether you approve, but whether the suffering registers with you at all. Huck’s sentence exists because he noticed something he had every reason to look away from, and that noticing is trainable in a way the opinion that follows it is not.
अर्थ और सीख
हक यहाँ ‘वे लोग’ नहीं कहता, ‘इंसान’ कहता है — यानी वह खुद भी इसमें शामिल है; और ‘हो सकते हैं’ कहकर वह किसी घटना की नहीं, एक क्षमता की बात करता है जो सबमें मौजूद है। पूरी किताब का सबसे गंभीर नैतिक निष्कर्ष एक अनपढ़ लड़के की सीधी-सादी भाषा में आता है। सीख: जब कोई ऐसा व्यक्ति दुख पाए जिसे आप बुरा मानते हैं, तब देखिए कि वह दुख आपको दिखाई भी देता है या नहीं — सवाल सही-गलत का नहीं, देख पाने का है।
Where it comes from
Huck after watching a crowd tar and feather the king and the duke — two confidence men who have cheated and endangered him throughout the book.
Twain gives the observation to a boy who has every reason to enjoy the sight and does not. Huck’s conscience keeps working on people who have not earned it, which is the novel’s quiet argument.
