Reflections on Reading, Empathy at Chism Beach
Chism Beach, Bellevue, WA
The “read books to build empathy!” line of thinking drives me bonkers … just a tiny bit. It’s a nice start, but what do readers do with newfound “knowledge” about a group/topic/whatever apparently gleaned from a book? I had a quickie trip to my hometown (pics are down the road from my childhood home), and I guess “empathy” was on my mind. What does that look like in practice? I don’t think there’s a formula or anything, but I loved this passage from the beginning of the last book I finished: The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright. Straddling a line between humorous cynicism and genuine curiosity — which might lead to genuine caring — she writes near the opening:
“We don’t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world a new way. We can meet.
When I began thinking about all this I was interested in empathy, like it’s the solution (and it is! it is!) to pretty much everything. I thought about gender and empathy, religion and empathy, the evolutionary benefits of empathy. I had a big beautiful cake in my head called ‘Feeling the Pain of Others’ and I sliced it this way and that because I thought that emotion is the bridge between people, sentiment crosses space, sympathy is a gas, exhaled by one, inhaled by the other. Empathy! It’s just like melting.
We can merge, you know. We can connect. We can cry at the same movie. You and I.
But some people can’t do this—really quite complicated—thing. There is a gap.
These days, I think there is a real gap between me and the next person, there is a space between every human being. And it is not a frightening space. The empty air which exists between people might be crossed by emotion, but it might not. You need something else, or you need something first. This is the thing Russell T. Hurlburt was talking about when he discussed different kinds of mental experience. People are different and they think differently. Now, I think the word we need is ‘translation.’”
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