Salon News

Our sympathy for fictitious characters can translate into compassion in real life

There was a lovely piece of writing in the Guardian recently about how reading both inspires empathy and connects people. This is not a new revelation for those who have participated in the Salon studies or other book studies. There is a wonderful connectivity that occurs in the presence of great ideas and complex language.

Overall, we need to find new ways to connect across political divisions & differences in world view– across gender divides and national perspectives. Literature offers this opportunity. Every week in the Salon conversations I witness how we learn to respect differing approaches– and use these to enrich our own particular world view.

Here is a selection from this article– I think you would enjoy the whole piece: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/17/a-literary-cure-for-loneliness-pick-up-a-book

But there is another important reason why everyone should read more books, and in particular fiction. The responsibility to combat loneliness lies with those who do not suffer from it. Lonely people often feel that there is no one out there, no one who understands them or can share their point of view. They need to know that actually there are. That requires everybody else to make the imaginative leap of feeling that connection, and reading fiction helps. It makes people more empathic – sympathy for fictitious characters can translate into compassion in real life.

The stories of strangers reach us through many means: news bulletins, interviews, biography and memoir, but also drama and fiction. Listening to these carefully, making imaginative connections, walking a mile in their shoes might help turn some of those strangers into real friends.

I always expect more from the New Years’ moment. We invest so much into this idea of the change of the year– that there will be an overturning– a renewal commiserate with the birth of the New Year. When I making plans towards the coming year in December– it just seems impossible– this distance from one year to another– that the holidays will come through with their whirring and sparkle and then slink out –and suddenly its January. I can hardly crack open the new calendar– those fresh pages in an unknown year seem impossible. There should be a kind of metallic grinding as the old gears give in to new or a new spirit of animation replaces the exhausted, dusty old.

Perhaps it doesn’t just happen, I think. The idea of New Years’ resolutions– those claims towards renewal, the commitment to change–are the means we have to turn this organic sense of change into something recognisable. Swimming in Proust means that I am constantly overturning ideas about time: how fragile is our understanding of time’s movement and our shaping within time, and how deeply we struggle to hold time and make the passing days in some way accountable in our scale of meaning.
That is one view of the past days: another, as fitfully captured in the picture above, is the stance towards passing days that focuses on those startling moments: when the moon bursts into the gloaming on a Christmas Eve walk; when dear friends turn up for a brief moment from miles and years away and the conversation yields remarkable insights; when a simple shared meal- a night like any other– suddenly becomes a galvanising moment– a treasure of solidity and laughter. These are the glimmers that light and lighten the way through time– and those moments also that we do not celebrate– those moments that carve us sharper as we meet and move through the tangled forests of the world– all of these become what we are. The passing of the old year into the new gives room for a recognition of how all these become a life.

This poem is a Solstice favourite; connection to the musings above? Perhaps– or just let it sing to you:

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

From Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29 by Rainer Maria Rilke

“Man of misery, whose land have I lit on now?

What are they here -violent, savage, lawless?

or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men?”

The Odyssey by Homer- VI, 131-133

In these days of agony—horror at the events in Paris last weekend, further horror at the bombings in Beirut, the hostage taking in Mali…outrage at the response of the politicians in the USA using these events as an excuse to reject those fleeing from the very perpetrators of this terrorism—the words of Odysseus ring in my ears.

At the heart of the Homeric universe is  Xenia: 

(Greek ξενία, xenía): the Greek concept of hospitality, or generosity and courtesy shown to those who are far from home or unknown. It is often translated as “guest-friendship” (or “ritualized friendship”) because the rituals of hospitality created and expressed a reciprocal relationship between guest and host. XENOS (the singular form) translates to: guest, host, foreigner, stranger and friend. For the ancients, stranger is a temporary state that with right protocol translates to friend.

Those that do not offer—or go so far as to desecrate- the rituals of hospitality show themselves to be ‘savage, lawless’—and are isolated, rejected and fought if they have invaded.

I am thinking about how in the ancient world as humans attempted to move from lives of violent struggle for survival to civilized existence, negotiating the encounter with strangers was vital. The way in which two people come to know each other, the movement from stranger to guest to friend, sits in core of our social system and is the early testament to our ascension into civilization—towards the best of human enterprise.

So although members of the US government (along with other anti-immigration advocates in mostly western countries) may not understand this—their response to reject desperate migrants from ravaged places shows their collapse of civilized behavior in the face of fear.

At times this past week I have felt frozen with inaction in the face of the deaths and sufferings of the people of Paris—and then appalled by the critique of the efforts on social media as people tried to come to terms with the events and their own fears and sense of helplessness. I sat down to a wonderful group working their way through Proust’s epic and felt the absurdity of discussing social manipulations and aristocratic degeneracy while the world burns. Unlike a dear friend who is dedicating her work to the Syrian migrants, I sit here in North London and agonize and promote reading literature.

I do not think that however iron clad we make our borders, however much we employ surveillance on ourselves or those we have defined as our enemies, we will ever eradicate terrorism until people everywhere have homes that are safe and food to eat and the freedom to live as they choose. I am so appreciative of the glimpses of defiant life in Paris following the attacks—the spontaneous choruses of La Marseillaise, the demonstrations, the cartoons and rejection of fear and hatred on the part of the Parisian people—even, and especially—those who lost loved ones in the attacks.

This offers the best response to the inhumanity shown by the IS/ISIS/ Daesh militants—along with the xenophobic US representatives. Live in a way that models civilized, progressive human behavior over violent and random inhumanity: and that means welcoming people in need, negotiating with right protocol your encounter with a stranger, offering a meal before you ask someone to tell their story. We can probably skip the offer of a bath with the scented oil rubdown as the precursor to the sharing of food and drink—although maybe that would help.

I accept that refusing to treat every migrant as a terrorist may mean that I will suffer—that me or my family or someone in my community will be killed because desperate people are rejecting the claims of the civilized society. I also understand that safety is not a guaranteed right –because my safety usually comes at the expense of another’s: for me to be absolutely safe the enforcing powers would make some assumptions about who is good and who is evil (always those defined as outsiders) and reject those whose profile causes concern. It seems to me a kind of arrogance that suggests I deserve to be totally safe while Syrian children are sleeping in freezing forest as their desperate parents risk everything to scrape out a life away from immediate fear.

In Ancient Greece, communities would take the risk of welcoming a stranger into their midst not knowing if their hospitality would be reciprocated with gifts or blood. Taking that risk: offering humanity first outweighed the risk that the stranger would respond inhumanely. In parts of Greece today, that same generosity is still being enacted as refugees are brought to shore on the island of Rhodes, Lesbos and other shores.

Imagine that, from beginning of the Syrian civil war, the Western countries had responded by spending billions on aid instead of the billions spent on military response—on supporting Turkey, Lebanon, Greece and Jordan in welcoming the migrants –how would this have changed the perceptions of Syrians toward the West?

Coming out of ten years of fighting the Trojan War, Odysseus had to learn to approach strangers & unknown communities without the impulse to attack. Here I may find the start of action in the face of my helplessness: approach the stranger with humanity. Accept the risk that there are people who have learned inhuman responses—but I will not let their inhumanity instruct mine.