Narrow Bridge
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This is a famous old quote, but I first heard it only a few years ago during Rabbi Lisa Rubin's Exploring Judaism class at New York's Central Synagogue. It felt immediately vivid, and made me think of life as a sequence of discrete moments. The moments are not continuous but appear to be, when strung together by lived experience. And they are layered over with narrative, such that the moments may be remembered less for themselves than for all the moments they were not, the paths not taken, the experiences missed out on. Freighted with these narratives, the sequence of moments seems vast and rich with meaning, when the truth is that the moments are lived one at a time, each one with the potential to be totally new, each one with the potential to be unencumbered by all that came before. And I imagined that if you looked back on what you thought was a vast and rich narrative but saw only a gossamer string of moments leading you to your present; and realized the path was largely shaped by forces outside of your control and unmoved by your efforts; and then looked side to side and saw utter emptiness; and then looked ahead and saw literally nothing, no future moment there to see until it happens… that could be very frightening indeed. To me, these sorts of ideas were Buddhist. I had heard them (and internalized them and then no doubt butchered them here) in that context. To hear them coming from a renowned 18th-century rabbi was novel and delightful.
Not that I had that much in mind, when I began trying to draw the comic. I was more concerned with figuring out how to get any kind of visual narrative out of an 18-word quote. And how to draw a bridge? I played around with different ideas, but knew I didn’t want a bridge itself, if only because it seemed too literal. A desert landscape of surreally tall hoodoos felt interesting, so I went with that. The main character is female because this comic was a learning exercise, and females are harder for me to draw. (Also, to many, religion is freighted with misogyny or with misguided notions of modesty, and it felt nice to undercut any such association by making the hero a strong lady in comfortable gym clothes.) She got a cat because Princess Nausicaa has a pet, and I was flipping through that comic to try and learn how to draw anything at all. Drawing this was far more challenging than anything I’d attempted before, and was beyond my abilities when I began it. I’m happy to have completed it at all.
A bit more about Nachman’s quote. This is its original Hebrew:
כל העולם כולו גשר צר מאוד והעיקר לא לפחד כלל.
To me, with my rusty Hebrew knowledge, the word-by-word translation would be, “The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is to not be afraid at all.” That didn’t sound very poetic to me, so I picked a different but common translation which also felt accurate. That said, there were other translations that purported to be more expressive of the quote’s real meaning. Here are two I liked:
All the world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is to not freak yourself out.
All the world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is to not be overwhelmed by fear.
“Don’t freak yourself out” and “don’t be overwhelmed by fear” are both more specific suggestions, and seem more humanly doable, than just simply “don’t be afraid.” But they felt a little wordy to me for a comic, so I went with the translation that felt more forceful, even if it meant a little bit less.
