Mutual Dependence as Our Shared Human Work
We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond. — Gwendolyn Brooks
—What lingers after this line?
One-minute reflection
What does this quote ask you to notice today?
A Communal Claim in Plain Speech
Gwendolyn Brooks compresses an entire social philosophy into a few declarative lines: “We are each other’s…” repeated like a steady drumbeat. That structure matters, because it insists this is not a sentimental preference but a condition of living among others. Rather than placing the self at the center, the quote begins by relocating meaning to the space between people—where effort, responsibility, and recognition circulate. As a result, the statement reads less like a private reassurance and more like a public reminder about what binds a community together.
“Harvest”: What We Reap From One Another
The word “harvest” frames relationships as seasons of labor and consequence: what we become is shaped by what others plant, tend, and model for us. Brooks suggests that our outcomes—skills learned, values absorbed, wounds carried, hopes sustained—are rarely self-made in the strict sense. In that light, praise and blame also become shared: a thriving neighbor often reflects unseen caretaking, while a struggling one can reveal neglected soil. This idea echoes the social texture in Brooks’s own work, where everyday lives accumulate meaning through interdependence, as in “The Bean Eaters” (1960), which portrays endurance not as heroic isolation but as quiet, mutual continuity.
“Business”: The Practical Duties We Owe
After the organic image of harvest, Brooks pivots to “business,” a term that brings moral life down to concrete transactions—time, attention, fairness, and accountability. Community, she implies, isn’t only empathy; it is also administration: showing up, keeping promises, sharing burdens, and negotiating conflicts. Even love has logistics. In this sense, her line resembles a civic ethic more than a romantic one. It aligns with the view that social bonds are maintained through ongoing work, much like Aristotle’s emphasis on friendship and polis in the Nicomachean Ethics (c. 350 BC), where flourishing depends on practiced reciprocity rather than isolated virtue.
“Magnitude”: Measuring Ourselves Through Others
Calling one another our “magnitude” suggests that human scale is not merely individual achievement but relational impact. We become “larger” through the people who challenge us, teach us, and extend our imagination of what is possible. Conversely, we can be diminished when others are denied opportunity or dignity, because the collective measure of a society shrinks with every preventable loss. This reframes status and success as distributed phenomena: your growth is partly evidence of someone else’s investment, and your neglect of others is a subtraction from the world you inhabit. The metric Brooks proposes is ethical, not merely economic—how much humanity we enable in one another.
“Bond”: The Tie That Is Chosen and Inherited
Finally, “bond” gathers the earlier terms into a durable connection: harvest implies shared outcomes, business implies shared responsibility, and magnitude implies shared meaning. Bond is what remains when moods fluctuate—a link that can be strengthened by care or weakened by indifference, but rarely erased without cost. Brooks’s insistence on “we” acknowledges that bonds are both inherited (family, neighborhood, history) and chosen (solidarity, friendship, commitment). Her line also hints at the fragility of social fabric: to deny the bond is to pretend we can cut the thread without unraveling ourselves.
A Modern Reading: Solidarity as Daily Practice
Taken together, Brooks offers a practical definition of solidarity: we shape each other’s outcomes, manage each other’s well-being, define each other’s significance, and remain tied to each other’s fate. The quote resists both cynicism (“everyone is on their own”) and naïve idealism (“care is effortless”), replacing them with a grounded view of mutual reliance. In everyday terms, it can look small: a teacher staying after class, a neighbor checking in during a storm, a coworker advocating for fair credit. Yet Brooks implies these small acts are not extras; they are the very economy of human life. We are, inevitably, each other’s work.